The 130-year-old Jewish Theological Seminary of America is embarking on a $96 million multi-year modernization that will keep its storied past safe — and carry the spiritual center for Conservative Judaism into the next century. JTS officials on Monday said they have put together a deal to sell one old dorm, a small parcel of…
The offices of One Month, Mattan Griffel’s startup in SoHo, are the first I’ve ever seen that have a wine fridge en suite. They also feature a fridge stocked with kombucha, and a pillow adorned with a smiling image of Griffel and his One Month co-founder, Chris Castiglione. When Griffel met me at the office…
In the 1921 Yiddish children’s book “The Wind That Got Angry,” by Moyshe Kulbak, an “old, wandering wind” finds himself booted out of his village when a thaw sets in. He tries to find somewhere in the woods to rest. He’s tired and wants to sleep, but no one wants him around. The oak tree…
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…
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