PUBLICATIONS & PODCASTS
INTERVIEW
Can We Teach Civil Discourse in a Digital Age? | A Conversation with Vikki Katz
Vikki Katz argues that civil discourse must be taught alongside digital discernment because students are trying to understand complex public issues through social media feeds that reward speed, outrage, and shallow certainty. Through the OR Initiative, she wants schools to help students build arguments from shared evidence, listen with curiosity, and stay in relationship when they disagree, especially around real current issues like the Middle East conflict, immigration, climate change, and political violence. Katz says teachers want to do this work but need administrator backing, clear parent communication, and ongoing professional learning communities, not isolated trainings that leave them exposed. She also warns that AI and digital tools should support, not replace, the hard human work of thinking, building knowledge, and talking face-to-face. Her core point is that schools may be one of the last places where young people can slow down, practice disagreement, and learn how to participate in civic life without disengaging from one another.
EDITORIAL
How to use the classroom as a place to confront antisemitism without deepening divisions
Confronting antisemitism requires more than condemning hateful behavior; schools must help students understand, question, and discuss identity-based conflict without deepening division. Since Oct. 7, Jewish, Muslim, and Arab students have faced fear, isolation, harassment, and emotionally charged online narratives that push them into rigid “sides.” Silence is not neutral, because when schools avoid difficult topics, students are left to learn from algorithms built for outrage. Their research found that students still see classrooms as places where they can wrestle with complexity, evaluate credible evidence, and practice disagreement without losing relationships. They call on schools to make evidence central, treat dialogue as a learned skill, and teach tough topics with clear guardrails so antisemitism and other forms of bigotry are interrupted before they harden into lifelong intolerance.
EDITORIAL
Social Media Is Toxic When It Comes to Tough Issues. Schools Can Help Kids Cope
Vikki Katz and Michael Levine argue that schools cannot prepare students for democratic life by avoiding hard topics. Teens already encounter polarizing issues through social media, where algorithms reward outrage and make truth harder to verify. Classrooms can help students slow down, examine evidence, ask honest questions, and practice disagreement, but teachers need support and clear guardrails. The authors call for schools to teach evidence-building, civil discourse, and tough issues directly so students learn to think, listen, and stay connected.
EDITORIAL
Teens are learning about conflict everywhere — except where it matters most
Teens are being forced to process polarizing news and graphic social media content before they have the context or adult support to understand it well. Based on research from Chapman University’s Or Initiative, the students know algorithms shape their feeds, but they still struggle to evaluate fast-moving, emotional content. This article makes the case that schools should not avoid tough topics. Instead, classrooms can provide students with a slower, more structured space to ask questions, examine evidence, disagree respectfully, and change their minds. Teachers want to help but often lack training, time, resources, and institutional support.
REPORT
Coming of Age in Polarized Times: Teaching Civil Discourse in a Digital Era
Our first-year report, uses the post–October 7 period and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as a case study to show how teens learn about contentious issues online, where schools fall short, and what evidence-based, developmentally grounded supports could help classrooms remain a place for real dialogue across difference.
WEBINAR
Antisemitism on Campus: Prejudice and Politics
Antisemitism is reemerging in the form of hate speech, vandalism, and even murder. For many, this surge has been intensified by the Israeli–Hamas war and the broader, deeply complex questions surrounding the future of Israel and the Palestinians. Much of the debate—and, in some cases, the violence—has converged on college campuses. In this Network for Responsible Public Policy webinar, Vikki Katz, Arno Rosenfelt (The Forward) and Graham Wright (Brandeis University) discuss what is happening on campuses today and explore both the myths and the realities behind these developments.
EDITORIAL
How to Talk With Students About Charlie Kirk
In Chronicle of Higher Education, Vikki Katz argues that after a polarizing act of political violence, educators should not retreat into silence but instead use the classroom as a stabilizing civic space where students can slow down, process what happened, and practice rigorous, evidence-based dialogue in contrast to the reactive online environment.She describes how guided discussion helped her own students hold moral complexity—condemning harmful rhetoric while also rejecting killing as a political response—and she outlines a practical approach for faculty: acknowledge the moment directly, model empathy that seeks understanding without endorsement, and end by cultivating habits of hope and care so students leave with resilience rather than despair.
PODCAST
Learning About Learning: Conversations with Scholars of Jewish Education
Antisemitism on Campus After October 7
In this conversation with other scholars, Vikki Katz explains how her post-October 7 work grew directly out of her prior research on youth, social media, polarization, and civil discourse. She conducted in-depth qualitative interviews to understand how politically left-of-center, Jewish American college students were making sense of rapid shifts in their Jewish and political identity, social belonging, and of the risks of speaking up in progressive spaces. For campus stakeholders, she argues the durable solution is investing in classroom-based learning (across disciplines, not only Jewish studies) that builds shared factual baselines and repeated practice in civil discourse, alongside clear, content-neutral conduct rules to protect campus free speech, including consistent enforcement when behaviors cross into threats or harassment, including online.
ARTICLE
Unsettled Ground: How Jewish Undergraduates are Negotiating Identity Shifts and (Un)civil Campus Discourse after October 7
In this peer-reviewed article in Journal of Jewish Education, Vikki Katz, Emma Forman, and Noel McGuire draw on in-depth interviews with Jewish American students and their non-Jewish peers, this study traces how students’ Jewish and political identities shift and realign, and how those changes shape whether they choose to engage in—or deliberately avoid—conversations about October 7, the war in Gaza and the wider Middle East conflict, and rising antisemitism in the United States.
ARTICLE
Through the (distorted) looking glass: Priorities for research with young people and social media in politically polarized times
In this peer-reviewed Journal of Children and Media article, Vikki Katz argues that young people are coming of age in a hyperconnected, politically charged media environment where social platforms pull distant conflicts—especially the Israel–Hamas war after October 7, 2023—into everyday life through graphic, decontextualized, side-taking content that can fuel incivility and strain peer relationships. She calls for research that better explains how exposure to extremist and punitive online exchanges undermines social trust and reduces the in-person conversations that build empathy and civil discourse; how gaps widen between “deeply involved” teens with diverse news diets and peers who rely mostly on feeds, shrinking who feels “worth” talking to; and how personalized, fragmented news plus constant awareness can intensify fear, particularly among minority students.
Prior research by Vikki Katz on children, teens, and emerging adults, digital equity, and family technology engagement can be found on GoogleScholar.
