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…
Among the many crises plaguing the presidential transition, one has special meaning for American Jews. You could almost call it a test case in the ability of the Jewish community’s expensive network of institutions to serve our needs and handle the scrapes for which they were designed. And they’re failing. If you look closely, we’re…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — An Orthodox Jewish umbrella group urged the Senate to confirm Betsy DeVos as education secretary and another expressed enthusiasm for her agenda, while the Reform movement expressed concerns about her support for government funding of religious schools. Agudath Israel of America said in a letter Tuesday to the Senate Education Committee as it…
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