This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish culture where you’ll learn about the latest (and sometimes earliest) in Jewish art, music (including of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen), film, theater, books as well as the secret Jewish history of…
Culture
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ORT’s Nonsectarian Work Booms
When ORT opened a computer-learning center in Brooklyn last year, the focus was on Orthodox Jewish students, but, within a few weeks, non-Jewish kids from the neighborhood were asking to take part. Now the Jews and non-Jews work next to each other every Tuesday and Thursday after school. The computer lab is a representative example…
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Examining Day Schools, Author Finds Troubled Teachers
The Forward’s Gabriel Sanders recently caught up with Ingall to chat about her book, day-school life and the difficulties faced by today’s young teachers. *literal asterisks* *literal asterisks* *literal asterisks* Gabriel Sanders: How did you arrive at the title of your book? Carol Ingall: There was a very popular book written in the late ’60s…
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Traveling Teachers Save Schools Across the South
A dozen students will be confirmed next spring at B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Pensacola, Fla. While the occasion is cause for celebration, it is also cause for concern: When those students are confirmed, B’nai Israel’s Sunday school will lose nearly half its students, and the congregation will no longer be able to pay…
The Latest
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Jews, Muslims Come Together on Rutgers Campus
On many college campuses, Jewish and Muslim students meet as adversaries, protesting events taking place in the Middle East, thousands of miles away. At Rutgers University Jewish and Muslim students are focusing on issues closer to home, and they are meeting as partners. The Human Development Project is a student club focused on bringing Jews…
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High School Seniors Open Interfaith Dialogue
During the last school year, seniors at the Abraham Joshua Heschel High School, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, met regularly with their counterparts at Al-Iman, an Islamic day school in Jamaica, Queens. Brought together by the Unity Program of Abraham’s Vision, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting dialogue between American Jews and Muslims, these students…
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Grant Helps Professor Tackle Adolescent Girls’ Issues
Certain topics of particular interest to adolescent girls go unaddressed in most classrooms, because they make many educators and students squirm: sex, gender, eating disorders, abusive relationships. Dr. Shira D. Epstein aims to change that situation. Epstein, an assistant professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education, has received a…
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Yeshiva University Undergrads Take a Broad View of Humanitarian Efforts
Last January, 14 students from Yeshiva University traveled to Honduras during their winter break. But they weren’t there to snorkel or sunbathe or swim in the Caribbean; they spent their “vacation” in a mountain village without heat, electricity or plumbing, building a school for a community of Evangelical Christians. The trip to Honduras, organized by…
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Talking Books Help Kids Learn To Read
In the first passage of a grade-school primer called “The Little Midrash Says,” Moses assembles the Children of Israel one last time before his death to make a speech, because he knows he will not survive their trek to the promised land. “I will repeat the Torah and mitzvos to them, and I will make…
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Hebrew Students Earn Credit
When Katie Melchior received her diploma this summer from San Diego’s Westview High School, her transcript showed that she had fulfilled the foreign-language requirement for her local school district by taking three years of Hebrew. Westview, however, doesn’t offer Hebrew classes; its foreign-language courses are limited to Spanish and French. Instead, Melchior studied the language…
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Meditation Hits the Jewish Mainstream
On any given morning at the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston, a group of seventh- and eighth-graders can be found lying quietly beside one another on old baby quilts, basking in the stillness of meditation. New Age music plays softly in the background, while their teacher leads them through a series of calming…
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The Capitol Gang
The recipe for a successful reality television series is relatively straightforward. Take a bunch of young, attractive coeds, cram them into a tight space and stoke their competitive instincts with a common challenge that demands both teamwork and individual distinction. Set up a camera, and voilá: instant drama, or, at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof….
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