Beyond Camels and Sand

Beyond Camels and Sand: How teachers are using innovative posters to make modern Israel come alive for Jewish students. SAN FRANCISCO—Jul. 11, 2005 —If you’ve heard about the splash BlueStar’s pro-Israel poster campaign has been making on college campuses, then it won’t surprise you to hear that the cutting-edge posters are making it big in the middle and high school worlds as well. “It has been really fascinating,” says Ruth Caprow describing her 6th and 7th grade art classes at Congregation Beth Sholom’s religious school in San Francisco. “I hung a handful of the posters on a large butcher-block paper on the classroom wall before the kids arrived. In class, I invited each of them up to the board with a marker in hand to scribble their ownthoughts and reactions. The students loved buzzing around, chatting about the posters, and adding their two cents, graffiti style. They were really engaged and had a great time!” “The posters-as-curriculum idea came to me after I had seen the images on bus shelters and billboards around the city,” she adds. “The uniquely positive messages about Israel are just the answer to the many negative viewpoints we’ve all heard. When I saw an article in the J (the Northern California Jewish Community Newspaper), with the web site listed for easy access to the posters, a light bulb went off. I knew that I could use the posters as the focus of my curriculum.