School Safety and Gun Violence: A Jewish Perspective

School Safety and Gun Violence: A Jewish Perspective

Tuesday at 12:00pm PDT

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As Jews, do we have an obligation to speak out about gun violence and school safety? What does our tradition teach us about tragedies in Uvalde, Parkland and other school shootings? Join school violence expert, Ron Avi Astor and AJU Instructor Jonathan Dobrer, for an in depth look at the data, what we can learn from the Israeli approach to gun violence and schools, and what our heritage teaches us.  

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Ron Avi Astor, PhD, holds the Marjorie Crump Chair Professorship in Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs with a joint appointment in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. His work examines physical, social-organizational, and cultural contexts in schools related to different kinds of bullying and school violence (e.g., sexual harassment, cyber bullying, discrimination hate acts, school fights, emotional abuse, weapon use, teacher/child violence). Over the past 20 years, findings from these studies have been published in more than 200 scholarly manuscripts. 

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Jonathan Dobrer teaches Current Events at American Jewish University and has taught at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He is a graduate of USC and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He studied philosophy in Vienna and spent two years in the Peace Corps in Tunisia. Jonathan also specializes in Comparative Religion, specifically, how Christianity developed from Hebrew scriptures, stories and archetypes; and how Islam grew from both Judaism and primitive Christianity.