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Ilana Snyder

Ilana Snyder

Ilana Snyder is President of the New Israel Fund Australia and an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. With Susan Feldman and Barbara Kamler, she co-edited Something That Happens to Other People: Stories of Women Growing Older (1996).

Ilana Snyder reviews 'The Uses of Digital Literacy' by John Hartley

May 2009, no. 311 01 May 2009
It doesn’t take much to realise that John Hartley admires the work of Richard Hoggart, the famous English literary critic and founder of the field of Cultural Studies. The titles of several of his books are tributes to Hoggart, including this one. As Hartley explains on the first page, The Uses of Literacy (1957) set the agenda for educational and disciplinary reform in schools and universities. ... (read more)

Ilana Snyder reviews 'The Flight of the Creative Class' by Richard Florida

May 2006, no. 281 01 May 2006
When Richard Florida, the peripatetic celebrity academic from George Mason University, was in Australia to promote The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), he described Sydney as one of a dynamic new generation of cities that is attracting global talent. The following year, as a guest of the Melbourne Fashion Festival, he included Melbourne with Helsinki, Stockholm and Minneapolis–St Paul as model ... (read more)

Ilana Snyder reviews 'Which School?' by Joanna Mendelssohn

September 2007, no. 294 01 September 2007
Joanna Mendelssohn is best known as an art critic and historian. After the publication of an essay in The Griffith review entitled ‘Going Private’, Pluto Press commissioned her to write a piece for its Now Australia series. Similar to Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essays, but even more determinedly non-academic, the Pluto Press format is part of a publishing phenomenon and covers a range of politic ... (read more)

Ilana Snyder reviews 'Waiting for Gonski: How Australia failed its schools' by Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor

June 2022, no. 443 25 May 2022
In 2011, when businessman David Gonski was reviewing education funding in Australia, he visited two primary schools in Sydney’s west. At the first, he found the principal dealing with glass from a break-in the night before. As he sat in the school’s reception, he observed that the children arriving for school were from non-English-speaking migrant backgrounds. When they toured the school, the ... (read more)

Ilana Snyder reviews 'Undemocratic Schooling: Equity and quality in mass secondary education in Australia ' by Richard Teese and John Polesel

May 2003, no. 251 01 May 2003
This books has a number of admirable qualities. In times when open subscription to a social justice agenda runs the risk of ridicule, it is a brave book. It does not shy away from identifying the universities – specifically, the sandstones – as integral to any explanation of why Australian secondary education is inequitable. And both authors work in one: the University of Melbourne. The book a ... (read more)

'Neighbour against neighbour: The cycle of conflict in Israel, Gaza, and Palestine' by Ilana Snyder

June 2021, no. 432 26 May 2021
Listen to this article as read by the author.   The Middle-East conflict is perhaps the most intractable in the world. Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for nearly a century over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The world has witnessed a never-ending cycle of tension and conflict, including a number of full-scale wars, with immense suffering on both side ... (read more)

Ilana Snyder reviews 'Dumbing Down: Outcomes-based and politically correct – the impact of the culture wars on our schools' by Kevin Donnelly

May 2007, no. 291 01 May 2007
Readers of The Australian could not fail to have noticed the numerous articles written by Kevin Donnelly over the last few years complaining about the ‘parlous’ state of Australian education. With extraordinary repetition, Donnelly has called for a return to a syllabus approach, the books of the canon and teacher-directed literature classes, where students are presented with universal truths. ... (read more)

Ilana Snyder reviews 'A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion' by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman

November 2019, no. 416 23 October 2019
In Israel’s recent election, Benjamin Netanyahu desperately defended his position as Israel’s prime minister, but perhaps also as a free man, because he may soon face trial for corruption charges. As Israelis learn more about his lavish life style, many yearn for the days of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), whom they recall as an ascetic statesman of vision and integrity. Netanyahu is seen as t ... (read more)

Ilana Snyder reviews 'Jean Blackburn: Education, feminism and social justice' by Craig Campbell and Debra Hayes

September 2019, no. 414 27 August 2019
In the foundation Jean Blackburn Memorial Lecture in 2014, David Gonski observed that Australian schooling was unfairly funded – that the money wasn’t going where it was needed. To our national shame, this is not a new phenomenon. Successive governments in Australia have adopted school-funding policies for which there has been little educational justification and which have contributed to the ... (read more)

Ilana Snyder reviews 'Antisemitism: Here and now' by Deborah Lipstadt

August 2019, no. 413 07 June 2019
Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt is renowned as the woman who defeated David Irving in court after he sued her for describing him as a Holocaust denier. Her portrayal by Rachel Weisz in the film Denial (2016) ensured that Lipstadt and her landmark victory achieved even wider celebrity. Thousands of books have been written on the history of anti-Semitism, and Lipstadt has not set out to write ... (read more)
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