Day school parents can take heart from Mr. Scrubs. “Wish I Was Here,” Zach Braff’s Kickstarter-funded film, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in late January. Fans — especially the 46,520 who helped pay for it to be made — were eagerly awaiting the “Garden State” follow up. And, exactly a decade after Braff’s first…
A few months into his rabbinical studies in Jerusalem in 2012, it struck Benjamin Ross how little Israelis seemed to know about American Jews like him. At the same time, the second-year Hebrew Union College student was mulling over the fraught, distanced relationships American Jews have with Israelis. “Many Americans have no concept of life…
My name is Ken Gordon, and I don’t belong to a synagogue. When the Pew Research Center reported that two-thirds of American Jews are in the same situation, I didn’t break out into a cold Jewish sweat, as did so many of my colleagues. I thought instead: I’m not alone! My wife and I send…
On a cold spring evening last year, my Jewish literature professor took his Sarah Lawrence College class to a klezmer performance by the band Zion80, a mash-up inspired by the music of Shlomo Carlebach and Fela Kuti. Inside the small, stuffy room at The Stone, a music venue in New York City, I watched students…
(Haaretz) — As a certified sex educator who runs a side business out of her home selling dilators and vibrators to the ultra-Orthodox and secular alike, Beverley Damelin was certain she had seen and heard it all. That includes the case of an elderly ultra-Orthodox woman who recently summoned Damelin to Bnei Brak so she…
(JTA) — For the first 3 1/2 weeks of the summer, one group of 5-year-olds at Ramah Day Camp in Nyack, N.Y., was “very quiet” as the children went about the typical camp activities, according to Amy Skopp Cooper, the camp’s director. But in the fourth week, the talking started – in Israeli-accented Hebrew. By the…
(JTA) — Synagogues aren’t the only institutions in the Conservative movement changing their policies to become more welcoming to non-Jews and interfaith families. The movement’s school network, Solomon Schechter, is too. Last week, the organization’s board voted to set up a task force to reconsider its admissions policies, which limit enrollment to Jews or non-Jews…
(JTA) — On a bright autumn morning, Hebrew songs and phrases fill the sun-drenched, freshly painted blue and white classrooms of New York’s Harlem Hebrew Language Academy Charter School. A group of kindergartners, representing such an even mix of black and white children that they resemble a 1980s Benetton ad, clasp each other by the…
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