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…
When Dr. Shira Berkovits worked as a consultant for the Orthodox Union, among other Jewish organizations, in synagogue youth programming, she was asked to give presentations that trained synagogue staff members in keeping children safe from abuse. “I thought I was going to do it for one year and walk away,” she says. Yet when…
It is hard to believe, but there is no agreed-upon curriculum in the Jewish education system in the United States. In the few schools where the idea of a curriculum exists, it usually presents the following problems: There is no K-12 curriculum. Rather, pre-school usually focuses on language skills and holidays, while elementary school and…
The founder of a group advocating for improved secular education in ultra-Orthodox schools says he received a death threat last week, following months of harassment on social media. “I want to tell you that I will kill you soon with God’s help, and very soon you will be dead and your blood will be spilled,”…
Two-thirds of millennials don’t know what Auschwitz is — and it might be because no one is teaching them. I recently applied for a grant to promote Holocaust education at local middle schools through field trips, a unit of Holocaust studies, and survivor testimonies. My grant application was rejected, which wasn’t completely surprising given the…
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