What’s good for America is good for its Jews. That’s the common and rosy assumption, anyhow. American economic progress lifts Jewish boats, too. America’s embrace of diversity legitimates everyone’s particular story. And even if Jews have appeared to act against their narrow interests — displaying the tendency to “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto…
Ten years ago, when we applied for permission to establish the city’s in Brooklyn’s District 22, representatives from the Department of Education questioned us about who exactly would patronize our proposed school. The DOE worried that only Jewish families would send their children to a school in which Modern Hebrew (instead of Spanish or Mandarin…
In his recent article, “I Support Boycotting Settlements – Should I Be Banned from Israel with my Children?,” Peter Beinart compellingly argues that Israel’s new law, which denies entry to any person who issues a public call for boycotting Israel, including the settlements, will force American Jews to choose between visiting Israel or opposing the…
The contentious confirmation of Betsy DeVos as education secretary provoked a fair number of outraged folks to threaten to exercise their own right to school choice and home-school their children. Timing-wise, this announcement coincided with Orthodox Jewish parents starting to get their tuition bills for the next school year. One friend in New York City,…
In the early 2000s, journalist Rebecca Wallace-Segall began leading creative writing workshops at New York’s Abraham Joshua Heschel School. She was, unknowingly, developing a program that would go on to teach hundreds of children across the United States how to write creatively After leaving the Heschel School, Wallace-Segall used the curriculum she developed while there…
Confirmation of Donald Trump’s pick for Education secretary now depends on a single Senate vote, and one Jewish billionaire is trying to make sure that it swings against Betsy DeVos. Eli Broad, a California businessman and philanthropist, sent a letter to senators urging them to vote against DeVos’s confirmation as Education secretary. “With Betsy DeVos…
In the Fall of 1936, Sam Sherman, an officer of the historically Jewish Phi Epsilon Pi fraternity (PhiEp) circulated a call to his fellow Greeks asking for funds to help Central European Jewish student refugees. The plea intended to assist young men who had been prohibited from completing their university studies because of Hitler’s rise…
Being an Orthodox Jew can cost a pretty penny. There are the premium prices for kosher meat, the two sets of dishes, the mikvah fees. There are expensive lifecycle celebrations like brises and bar mitzvahs, and requisite accessories like tefillin ($1,000). The Jewish holidays have expenses all their own: sukkahs, shmura matzah, big holiday meals…
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