In 1984, my time was mostly divided among school, preparing for my bar mitzvah and playing Castle Wolfenstein on my family’s Apple II+. Castle Wolfenstein was a game about a prisoner escaping from a Nazi bunker. The bunker is labyrinthine, with multiple levels. I knew every inch of it. Everywhere there were guards, but they…
Shimon Waronker seems an unlikely candidate to be running schools in some of New York’s most challenging neighborhoods. An unassuming man with a beard and a black yarmulke, Waronker has opened three successful schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx — bringing educational models informed by the country’s most notable preparatory academies to students who otherwise…
In November of last year, Beit Berl, a teachers college in Kfar Saba, north of Tel Aviv in Israel, held a graduation for bachelor of education students. The ceremony was unremarkable but for the students it honored: All 63 of them were ultra-Orthodox Jews. They were the first cohort in a new program to educate…
As an educator in New York, I believe that Jewish education in this country teaches kids to engage with the world and its complexities, just not with Israeli politics. It teaches them to speak up about racism, but not Israeli racism. It teaches them to fight for equality, but that in Israel that fight has…
It took a product of the ultra-Orthodox school system to get New York City to investigate the quality of secular education at the city’s ultra-Orthodox schools. Following a campaign by Naftuli Moster, 29, founder and executive director of an activist group called YAFFED (Young Advocates for Fair Education), New York City’s Department of Education announced…
“So, wait, Miss — there is a difference between Jews and Israelis?” Coming from a seventh-grade Jordanian of Palestinian origin, this question was a breakthrough in my classroom. As a foreign teacher in a private Jordanian school, I need to be careful what I say in front of my students. I am not allowed to…
(JTA) — When Ali Martell’s eldest daughter reached school age, Martell and her husband both assumed she’d go to a Jewish day school, as they had. And for a while, she did. But after the couple’s two younger children started school, too, the Martells began to feel overburdened by tuition. They couldn’t afford to send…
About 2 miles west of the Delaware River, eight deaf Jewish girls sit circled on a gym floor, tossing plastic fruits and vegetables at each other. Zissy Moskowitz, one of two interpreters for the group, walks around the circle, taking pictures for a blog the girls’ parents have been following for two weeks now. Moskowitz,…
דער בעל־שׂימחה האָט יאָרן לאַנג געדינט ווי דער רעדאַקטאָר פֿונעם ייִדישן פֿאָרווערטס.
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