Over generations, no matter their religious practice, Jews have shared a commitment to educating their children. In New York, the government has set the standards for that education and taken the legal responsibility to ensure that every child in every school, whether public, private or religious, receives an education that meets those standards. And yet,…
It’s no longer deniable that anti-Semitism is on the rise across the globe. According to the Anti-Defamation League, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose by a record 57% in 2017. Beyond the vivid and terrifying displays of anti-Jewish hate in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the 2018 Tree of Life…
Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American By Ilana Blumberg Rutgers University Press, 210 pages, $19.95 American popular culture lies to us about teachers. It tells us they ought to be magical. Teachers, in the American imagination, enter schools as shadowy outsiders, often inexplicably. It doesn’t matter whether we are in…
For years now, the Hasidic community has feigned compliance with New York State Education laws. While Hasidic yeshivot don’t typically provide much secular education at all, they have at least claimed that they were complying with the law. However, a recent speech by the Satmar Rebbe Aron Teitelbaum disabuses once and for all the notion…
The definition includes some criticism of Israel — “demonizing” it, applying double standards to it unlike other countries, or denying its right to exist.
By his own admission, Stanley S. Rosenfeld, a Jewish educator who worked primarily in New York City and Rhode Island, sexually abused “hundreds” of children — nearly all middle school-aged boys — during his five-decade career. From a beloved summer camp in New Jersey, to elite Orthodox schools in New York, to a small Conservative…
The spring I turned fourteen, my mother bought me a peach-colored T-shirt. I don’t know why I loved it so much. Perhaps because things had been so gray around me, so muddled in the confusion of teenage-hood, that the color of this shirt brought hope and warmth to my spirit. About two weeks after my…
Last April, passage of the New York State budget was delayed by a state senator’s contending there ought to be a separate, and weaker, standard for educating some children attending New York State’s non-public schools. For decades, New York State required all school age children to be provided with a comparable program of instruction whether…
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