The Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE), founded as the Coalition for Alternatives in Jewish Education, was a non-profit organization based in New York City. Its activities included an annual conference that drew ~2000 Jewish educators, advocacy for Jewish educators, various education-related publications, and more. Its founding was the brainchild of Jerry Benjamin and Cherie Koller-Fox.
In 2009, CAJE closed. In 2010 a new organization called NewCAJE arose, led by founder Cherie Koller-Fox.
CACAJE's yearly CAJE conference drew between 350 at the first conference and as many as 2,400 Jewish educators from around the world at later conferences..The first conference was held in August 1976 at Brown University. Around 350 people attended. It was sponsored by NETWORK where Jerry Benjamin was the President. At the end of the conference, the participants voted to have another conference which was held one year later in Rochester, NY where CAJE was officially founded.
Due to its size and nature, the CAJE conference was held on a university campus.
The CAJE conference was the model for the Limmud Conferences in England and later around the world.
Unlike other conferences of its size, the CAJE conference typically offered several hundred workshops over the course of only a few days. The workshops were lead for the most part by teachers in the field. The daily workshops were supplemented by evening keynote addresses and performances of the arts including music, storytelling, comedy, dance and art etc.and a choir led by Debbie Friedman. Most importantly, the CAJE definition of teacher included "anyone involved in the transmission of Jewish education and culture. It is a pluralistic organization that included all who worked in Jewish education from any denomination and teaching any age group from birth until adulthood.
Many innovations in Jewish education were spread through the conference to Schools around the country and the world. The networking that happened there created a field of Jewish education and gave support to teachers in every setting, both formal and informal. At CAJE 25, CAJE started to advocate for better salaries, higher status, benefits, professional development and other things necessary to create an excellent teaching community to educate Jews living in the Diaspora.
In recent years, sub-conferences such as the "Consortium for the Future of the Jewish Family" ran concurrently with the CAJE conference.For 26 years, Dr. Elliot Spack was the Executive Director of the Organization. There were 11 Presidents of CAJE: Rabbi Dan Syme, Jerry Benjamin, Rabbi Cherie Koller-Fox, Rabbi Stuart Kelman,Carol Starin, Betsy Dolgin Katz, Rabbi Michael Weinberg, Sylvia Abrams, Alan Wiener, Fran Perlman and Iris Petroff. Each conference had Chairpeople and there were thousands of volunteers who organized and taught at every conference. Special mention should be made to Stuart Kelman, Joel Grishaver and Ron Wolfson who were the founders of the West Coast region that made CAJE a National Organization.
CAJE went bankrupt in the Winter of 2008 in part because of the recession that year that stressed the finances of synagogues and schools who paid for educators to attend and partly because of the financial mismanagement on those running the organization.
All past program books for NewCAJE are the NewCAJE Website.