E-mail: nurit.novis@gmail.com 

I am a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Counseling and Human Development at and at the Department of Learning, Instruction and Teacher Education at Haifa University in Israel. After completing my PhD in clinical psychology at Hebrew University, I was a Fulbright scholar and then a Goldman Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in California. I also taught at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem's psychology department as a teaching associate. I currently research, teach and publish in Haifa, on the psychology of religion, cultural identity, pluralistic thinking, moral education, Jewish education, and Haredi society. I am also an active member and principal investigator of several international research teams.

In the context of Jewish education, I have been pursuing the following directions:

1. Educating towards pluralism: Both/and reasoning

Both/and reasoning is one of the unexplored prerequisites of pluralistic thinking. It is the metacognitive ability to recognize the multiplicity of thoughts and beliefs in the social world and an endorsement of their value and worth. Such reasoning can draw on the complexity of the social world, the limitations of any single perspective, or the richness, beauty or social utility of multiplicity  My studies explore Both/And reasoning among adults and adolescents, test its relation to religiosity, test interventions to enhance it, and explore its effects on the willingness to embrace diversity. A recent study we have just begun targets Jewish Israeli secular and religious students in junior high schools, to test the effect of an intervention program to enhance Both/And reasoning on openness to others.

2. Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) students in higher education.

I have explored, along with several colleagues, how Hardi women have been navigating their dramatic entrance into the world of higher education. We have studied the reactions of college professors to this population, interviewed and surveyed hundreds of Haredi students about their experiences, and developed explanatory models for their reactions to the difference in worldviews they encounter. We hope to embark on a study explaining the high levels of Haredi drop-out from higher education institutions and to explore what can be done to prevent this.

3. Holocaust education and teacher attitudes towards the Holocaust 

Together with Prof. Arieh Kochavi, I am leading an international and interdisciplinary team of Holocaust-memory researchers under the auspices of the Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research and the Weiss-Livnat international graduate program for Holocaust studies. Our comparative research project is exploring the changes taking place in Holocaust memory in Germany, Hungary, Poland, the UK, and France. Each of these countries bears a distinct Holocaust heritage and is also facing political and economic changes as well as challenges of refugee immigration. This intersection of past and present is expressed, among other ways, in a rise of nationalism, revisions to national WWII narratives, increased anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment. We are examining the relations between these phenomena in three domains: exploration of the national-political public discourse regarding WWII and Holocaust memory as it relates to anti-Semitic discourses and delegitimization of the State of Israel’s existence; a study of Holocaust educators using an innovative comparative Holocaust Education Attitude scale which I developed and a comparison to Israeli teachers; and an analysis of social media platforms to categorize and correlate references to the Holocaust, Israel, Jews and nationalism. 

4. God concepts, and teaching children about God and critical thinking

I have conducted psycho-educational developmental work on children's and adults' God concepts, including the educational implications of these. I am now testing a third dimension in God concepts, beyond the two recognized axes of Loving/punitive and abstract/concrete, which is a dimension of unity/complexity. I am also testing the correlation between these dimensions and attitudes towards otherness, such as prejudice and Both/And reasoning.