Jewish Italian chef and cooking teacher Silvia Nacamulli doesn’t believe in keeping particular recipes in the family, and as she collects the vegetables for eggplant Parmigiana or fried matzo fritters with pine nuts and orange zest, she is constantly thinking of how she can make the recipe easier for her students to follow. “I’m someone…
The Republican Party’s new platform calls for teaching the Bible as literature in public schools. But which Bible, exactly, would the Republicans approve of? The idea of the Bible taught in public schools has a fraught Constitutional history. For the Jewish community, it can bring back memories of “prayer in the schools” or mandatory participation…
As you read these words, a new law is being hustled through Israel’s Knesset that would abolish all requirements for the teaching of a “core curriculum” in ultra-Orthodox Israeli schools, even those that are partly funded by the government itself. If the bill becomes law, many young Israelis educated in right-wing Orthodox yeshivot will learn…
When I was ten years old, I learned about the educational summer slide which disproportionately impacts low income students who often lack age-appropriate books at home. As an avid reader myself, I was upset to learn that this loss of educational skills over the summer adds up over the years and can significantly disadvantage these…
As a high school English teacher who writes poetry in her free time, I read a poem a day at the start of each class period. Last September, I read poems by Emma Lazarus, because students were going to be writing an essay about her famous sonnet “The New Colossus.” When I introduced her to…
Writing in the Forward, Yitzchak Adlerstein and Michael Broyde recently argued that if New York State tried to force Satmar schools to provide an adequate secular education, the State would lose, because of a 1972 Supreme Court case, Wisconsin v. Yoder. This is a profound misreading of the case. In Yoder, the Court upheld the…
As a sixth-grade teacher of math and literacy at a Hasidic school in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, I am extremely disappointed by the silence of mainstream Jewish organizations regarding a secular education bill moving through the New York State Legislature. The bill in question, introduced by Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee, would enforce a law passed in 1928 that…
It is a simple and obvious equation: If you educate girls and women, you improve the world. Economists know this. It’s likely that even the most sexist of humans know it (deep, deep down). But when documentarian Debra Gonsher Vinik set out to investigate the role religious organizations play in securing and perpetuating education for…
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