Uriel Heilman
By Uriel Heilman
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Fast Forward New York Tax Credit Could Help Orthodox Schools
(JTA) — When Rhode Island adopted an education tax credit program a few years back, it resulted in a windfall for the state’s two Jewish day schools. Between them, their students received some $400,000 in scholarship money in the program’s first year. In Florida, tax credit legislation has resulted in nearly $10 million annually for…
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Fast Forward A Shtetl Grows in Upstate New York Town of Bloomingburg
This is how you launch a Hasidic shtetl in 21st-century America. Step 1. Find a place within reasonable distance of Brooklyn where the land is cheap and underdeveloped. Step 2. Buy as much property as you can in your target area – if possible, without tipping off locals that you plan to turn it into…
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News Amid Asian Influx, Brandeis Sticks With Jewish Identity
(JTA) — When Jeff Wang was applying to U.S. colleges more than two years ago from his home near Shanghai, Brandeis University was a top choice. Like many Chinese students now at Brandeis, he had discovered the university on Chinese Internet forums that touted the school’s academic rankings and its high faculty-to-student ratio. Wang noted…
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News Geeky Pot Testing Pioneers Seek To Leverage Colorado’s Jewish Marijuana Connection
(JTA) — Seth Wong’s place of work is heavily cluttered, with shelves loaded with moldy bagels, stale cake and fermenting carrots. There’s a not-so-faint smell of urine in the air. But if all goes according to plan for Wong and his new business partner, JJ Slatkin, their new office soon will have something else in abundance:…
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Fast Forward Reconstructionists May Lift Ban on Intermarried Rabbis
(JTA) — The Reconstructionist movement is on the cusp of making a historic decision about whether to drop its longstanding ban against intermarried rabbinical school students. If the policy change passes, as most expect, Reconstructionism would become the first of America’s four major Jewish religious denominations to ordain intermarried rabbis. Supporters of the change argue…
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News Does Switch Really Make It Kosher To Switch Lights on Shabbat?
(JTA) — It promises a revolutionary innovation that could transform Jewish Sabbath observance. By changing the way a light switch works, the patented Kosher Switch offers a novel — and, its backers say, kosher — way to turn light switches (and, perhaps, other electrical appliances) on and off during Shabbat, circumventing one of the Sabbath’s…
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Fast Forward Conservatives Turn to Musical Instruments in Services
(JTA) — When Rabbi Bruce Dollin first talked to the board at his Conservative synagogue about launching an alternative, singing-centered Shabbat morning service that would use musical instruments, he didn’t encounter much resistance. Over the two decades he had led the Hebrew Educational Alliance in Denver, attendance at the synagogue’s regular Shabbat davening – a traditional…
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Fast Forward Benjamin Netanyahu Set To Deepen Feud With Barack Obama Over Iran Deal
(JTA) — For President Obama, the framework agreement reached Thursday with Iran is a “historic understanding” that does more to roll back Tehran’s nuclear program than any possible alternative and avoids the risk of a destructive war in the Middle East. To Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s the complete opposite: a pact that “threatens the…
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Culture RFK Jr.’s poems to Olivia Nuzzi are peak cringe — so were King Solomon’s
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News As young Jews move away from Israel, Jewish leaders are reluctant to change their approach
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Film & TV For ill and for good, this ‘Wicked’ song has become ubiquitous
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News DNA test kits spark a surge of online conversions to Judaism in the U.S.
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