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…
Just in time for Mandela Day, Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County spearheaded the ribbon cutting ceremony of a new school library in South Africa. The Langabuya School previously had a single bookcase that served as its library for its 1,000+ students, but SSDS students raised funds to purchase some 1,000 new books, which…
In 2015, New York City announced it was launching a major investigation into secular education standards at yeshivas. Three years later, no such report has surfaced. Now, activists are calling on the city’s public advocate and comptroller to investigate the city itself for failing to address what they say are widespread educational shortcomings in the…
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