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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Montessori Movement Offers Jewish Educators an Alternative
Ayelet Lichtash has had a busy summer. In the fall, she will welcome the first class to a new preschool in North Bethesda, Md., that marries a regular Jewish curriculum with the principles of Montessori education. Her summer has been consumed with securing zoning, building a playground, recruiting teachers and inspiring parents to sign up…
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Social Action Month Aims To Boost Student Activism
The month of Heshvan — the second month of the Jewish calendar — is traditionally known as “Bitter Heshvan”; the High Holy Days are over, and gloom sets in as the leaves fall from the trees. A new initiative, however, aims to take some of the bitterness out of Heshvan by transforming it into Jewish…
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Holocaust Program for Teachers Resumes After Hiatus
After being suspended for three years, a summer study program for Holocaust educators resumed last month with a revised itinerary. The Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Program, initiated by the Jewish Labor Committee in 1984, has been taking teachers to Shoah-related sites in Poland and Israel for two decades. But each summer since 2002, the…
The Latest
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SAT Tutor Raises Scores by Singing a Silly Song
Renee Mazer is trying to help high school students get into good colleges — by teaching them silly songs and cheesy poems. Mazer is the creator of “Not Too Scary Vocabulary!: For the SAT and Other Standardized Tests and Success in Life,” a boxed set of CDs (or audio tapes) aimed at beefing up students’…
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Day School Innovates Curriculum With Help From Corporate Donor
As Jewish day schools strive to attract a new generation of computer-savvy students and their very discriminating parents, private funding from secular sources may be the key to the future. This fall, South Area Solomon Schechter Day School, located in Stoughton, Mass., will launch an integrated math and science program with a cutting-edge curriculum designed…
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Living With Asperger’s: Education Is a Struggle
College is a struggle no matter what your mental status is. For me, it was particularly challenging, because I have Asperger’s syndrome, which was diagnosed when I was 18. It’s a “hot” disorder in popular culture: Characters with this form of high-functioning autism have turned up in several recent novels, including the best-selling “The Curious…
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Kids With Special Needs Find Increasing Opportunities
Educational programs for students with special needs in Boston-area Jewish day schools got a significant financial boost this summer. In June, Combined Jewish Philanthropies announced a $2 million investment to enhance and expand the schools’ special education programs. The money comes from the Peerless Excellence Project, a CJP initiative funded through a $45 million donation…
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Pilot Program Focuses on Teacher Retention
The largest North American organization for Jewish educators is taking on the greatest challenge facing Jewish schools: employing and retaining quality teachers. The Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education recently released its third semiannual progress report on Project Kavod, a three-year pilot project designed to improve the recruitment and retention of teachers working in…
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Asch’s Diamonds
Maybe it’s the fallacy that rewarding literature must be difficult that explains why no scholar has lingered in the literary universe of Polish-born American Yiddish novelist and playwright Sholem Asch (1880-1957). Asch, who published alongside Isaac Bashevis Singer and other luminaries in the Yiddish Forward, was considered a master of Yiddish fiction until a literary…
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Crossing Into the Director’s Chair
Like Leo Spivak, the character he plays in “King of the Corner,” Peter Riegert is on the road, selling his wares. But unlike the troubled Spivak, who is trapped in a job he increasingly dislikes — running focus groups for home-safety systems — as he undergoes a massive midlife crisis, Riegert is traveling across the…
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A Fashion Icon Reveals Her Tough Side
“I’m pretty tough,” Diane von Furstenberg explained. No kidding. Sitting barefoot in her expansive office in Manhattan’s hip Far West Village, the princess-turned-socialite-turned-clothing-designer emits a cool vibe that is simultaneously glamorous, stern and relaxed. On a simmering summer afternoon, von Furstenberg looks flawless in white — showing no side effects from the sweltering heat —…
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