By Anthony Weiss
Every morning for the past month, Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi has arisen at 5 to check the Asian markets. Every day, she scrutinizes the fluctuations in the financial world and reads up on the latest business news, trying to gauge which way stocks are heading and what the fallout will be.
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By Andrew Marantz
This past July, a few high school students and I sat around an unusable fireplace in an air-conditioned library at Yale. The teenagers wore flip-flops and short shorts and sunburns; they peppered their speech with “like,” as well as their newly acquired SAT vocabulary. At my behest, they were discussing the ethicist Peter Singer.
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By Alison Klayman
My roommates and I built the only rooftop sukkah in Beijing, 16 floors above the traffic on Second Ring Road, overlooking Sinopec headquarters and the small Olympic park next door. It was a true Chinese sukkah — made in part with PVC pipes and metal wire from a local construction market — and we were nervous that our neighbors would assume we were building some kind of permanent structure and report us to the Public Security Bureau.
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By Jeri Zeder
With 18 years and counting of support for innovative initiatives in Jewish education, the Covenant Foundation marked its chai anniversary last month with a three-day celebration in New York City. The festivities included a gala evening, dispersal of awards and — true to Covenant Foundation form — opportunities for serious discussion among some of North America’s most creative Jewish educators. Attending were 40 of the organization’s 54 surviving Covenant Award winners and more than a dozen emerging leaders in Jewish education.
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By Beth Schwartzapfel
Because she’s 17, Laura Alonge hears a lot of sex jokes. She and her friends have all seen “Knocked Up” and “Superbad” and the million other horny-stoner-kids films that have recently captured the hearts and minds of high schoolers across the country. It drives her crazy, though, that her peers don’t know truth from fiction. “They hear in a Seth Rogan movie, ‘the law of gravity, what goes up must come down,’ and they think you can’t get pregnant if you’re on top,” she said. Even at her public high school, in what she describes as her “very liberal, not very religious” town of Lynbrook, N.Y., on Long Island, “sex ed was too short and too late. The kids weren’t really walking away with what they needed.” So Alonge, in her quest to make sure she and her peers received scientifically accurate, age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education in their schools, teamed up with an unlikely partner: a faith-based organization.Read More
By Ken Gordon
Back in September, JBooks.com, the Web site I edit, teamed up with JVibe, the magazine for Jewish teens, to throw an intergenerational event called Get Lit 2008. Preparing for this literary soirée (which featured writers Tova Mirvis, Jonathan Wilson, Adam Wilson and Jon Papernick) was a lot of work, but publicizing it was remarkably easy. Why? A happy accident, really: our publications live in a kind of non-profit kibbutz here in Newton Upper Falls, Mass., and many of our friends and neighbors helped get the word out.
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By Lana Gersten
When the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York was planning a celebration for its 10 year anniversary in 2006, the group decided to commemorate the milestone by giving out its largest grant in history: a sum of $300,000, to be paid over three years. It was a significantly larger amount than the foundation had ever given in the past.Read More
By Lana Gersten
Lisa Nord and Jay Podberesky were hard at work on a recent Sunday, cutting sheetrock and trimming window frames in a bare space in Brooklyn that will one day be a home for a family in need.
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By Leah Hochbaum Rosner
Whether it’s for purely altruistic purposes or for a big, fat tax break, many of us have been known to give to charity — especially around the High Holy Days. Most of us choose a handful of pet causes, sign our names to a few checks and forget about them until next year’s Yom Kippur approaches. Not Yosef Birnboim. The 30-year-old gives tzedakah nearly every time he turns on his computer.
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By Marissa Brostoff
Fighting poverty and improving public education are no easy tasks, but for young activists living in such a huge city as New York, finding kindred spirits to march with at the next rally can be a challenge in its own right. A group of politically progressive Jewish 20-somethings is trying to make it a little easier.
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Cleveland Kidnapping, Elizabeth Smart and Us
Tracing the Jewish Origins of the Holy Ghost
Magen Tzedek, Ethical Kosher Seal, Stalled Amid Orthodox Opposition
Baby Boomers’ Rocky Road to Jewish Love
Google Earth for the 16th Century Mapmaking Set
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