IN 2006 and 2007, I will once again teach Jewish history to students at Ivry Prozdor High School at The Jewish Theological Seminary. The seminary will also be my home for a third and final year, as I near completing coursework for two Master's degress, one in Jewish education and a second in Jewish history. As part of my education degree, this year I will be student-teaching at a Jewish high school in the New York area. A chronicle of my experiences at both Prozdor and as a student-teacher can be found at my teaching blog.   Islam and Judaism: Intermingled, Interwoven...Interrupted? This is a course that charts the relationship between Jews and Muslims since the advent of Islam in the 7th century to contemporary times. Though the course is not designed to answer questions about the Arab-Israel conflict it does stem from a desire to analyze the assumptions we in the West make about Islam and, more specifically, the relationship between Islam and Judaism over the last 1,500 years. I have created the course is with an AP high school audience in mind, one that attends a Jewish high school.  Download the full semester-long curriculum here as a PDF. Creation Stories This curriculum addresses the weight of myth. It focuses primarily on the way stories shape belief, change thinking and behavior, as well as how they shape individuals and communities. Stories dominate our lives; they influence learning as well as entertainment. They are omnipresent. Understanding their function on a deeper level will help students access their meanings more  easily. Learning about how stories work will give students a feeling of connection to ancient  ancestors and their surviving legacy: perspectives, explanations and extrapolations on the world  they saw and tried to grasp.  Download the curriculum here as a PDF.   The city of Jerusalem was conquered by the Muslims in 638 CE. Until then, it had been ruled, in the main, by the Christians. Jews had been exiled from the city after the Christianization of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Constantine. The Caliph 'Umar ibn Al-Khattab was second in succession to the mantle of leadership after the death of Muhammad and is widely credited with the designation of the Temple mount on Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem as a Muslim prayer site. A Jewish apostate named Ka'b al Ahbar pointed out the site to 'Umar, though it had been hidden beneath centuries worth of refuse. The site was cleansed and made suitable for a prayer site which would eventually become the Dome of the Rock, the gleaming golden dome that sits above the remaining wall of the second Israelite temple. Jews in various places began to seize upon an atmosphere of messianism and claimed that the end of days was close at hand. One such interpretation is captured in a curious work, The Secrets of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, (known in Hebrew as Nistarot Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai) which gives an apparent recounting and interpretation of the ascendancy of the Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates, two of the first major Islamic dynasties. Here's an excerpt of this document, extant in a couple of versions and first published in 1743 in Greece. Nistarot Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai was probably written in the 8th century CE, and then augmented as time went on, accounting for the various machinations within Islamic rule. In it, the writer asks, "Is what the kingdom of Rome has perpetrated upon us not yet enough?" After hundreds years of suffering under Christianity, the writer asks, how can it be that another domineering empire will rule over the Jews? The answer, given by an angel, positions Islam as a harbinger of the Mosaic messianic age, initally establishling a unique relationship between Judaism and Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries CE.   Rabbi Akiva's famous dictum investigated. [MORE]