Tag: lehrhaus

  • Episode 23: Jewish futurist Learning Spaces with Rabbi Charlie Schwartz

    Episode 23: Jewish futurist Learning Spaces with Rabbi Charlie Schwartz

    The Jewish futurism Lab
    The Jewish futurism Lab
    Episode 23: Jewish futurist Learning Spaces with Rabbi Charlie Schwartz
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    In this episode, we sit on the patio at Lehrhaus, a Jewish tavern and house of learning in Somerville, in front of a mural by Boston based Jewish artist Chloe Rubinstein, and explore the story behind this unusual space. Rabbi Charlie Schwartz shares his Jewish origin story, how he and cofounder Joshua Foer first imagined Lehrhaus, and why they designed it so that every drink, dish, piece of wall art, book, classroom, and interaction can be a form of learning. We talk about his background in digital Jewish education, his passion for media and spaces, and how Lehrhaus aims to send people home with new habits, new ideas, and a sense of Jewish “third space” they can return to for a refuel. The conversation looks toward the future of Jewish life and asks what it means for a tavern to become both a beit midrash and how I plan to use Lehrhaus as my laboratory for Jewish ritual design.

    If you are in the Somerville,MA area, stop into Lehrhaus and have a drink, food, and learning. Lehrhaus is located at:

    425 Washington Street Somerville, MA 02143

  • Episode 17- Recoding the Lehrhaus: Jewish Learning in the Future Tense

    Episode 17- Recoding the Lehrhaus: Jewish Learning in the Future Tense

    The Jewish futurism Lab
    The Jewish futurism Lab
    Episode 17- Recoding the Lehrhaus: Jewish Learning in the Future Tense
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    This episode explores Franz Rosenzweig’s radical vision for Jewish education through the Frankfurt Lehrhaus (1920) and traces its influence into contemporary experiments in creative, future-oriented learning. Rosenzweig rejected passive transmission of knowledge and instead cultivated dialogical, participatory study rooted in lived experience. His Lehrhaus was not simply a school. It was a reorientation of how Jewish life could be learned, practiced, and renewed in modernity.

    That same impulse appears in emerging frameworks like Jewish futurism and the Hiddur Olam creative learning system, which treat tradition as a living medium rather than a fixed archive. The episode draws a line between Rosenzweig’s early 20th century intervention and present-day efforts to design learning environments that are adaptive, imaginative, and relational.

    The episode also highlights the Lehrhaus in Boston as a contemporary expression of this lineage. On June 24, 2026, an in-person course on Jewish futurism will take place there, offering a practical extension of these ideas. The session invites participants to move beyond preservation toward creative responsibility, asking not only what has been inherited, but what must be built.

    Along the way, the episode examines what might be missed when Rosenzweig is reduced to philosophy alone. His educational project was infrastructural. It reshaped who teaches, how learning happens, and what counts as participation. That shift remains unfinished.