About 40 years ago in Chicago, halfway through Hebrew school class, my teacher realized I was hiding under her desk, making faces at other students, trying to make them laugh. She sent me instantly to the principal’s office. The thing is, I was one of the “good kids” who rarely disrupted class and seemed genuinely…
As a boy growing up in downtown Manhattan with a college president for a mother and psychiatrist for a father, David Coleman often had lively and lacerating dinner table conversations. “My parents, while both working, were home every night at dinner,” said Coleman, now 43. The family wasn’t satisfied with easy repartee. If Coleman went…
Someone once asked Pamela Anderson — the regular Playboy centerfold and “Baywatch” star — what she thought her two sons would be like when they grew up. She joked that in order to rebel against her, they would probably become accountants. Though the quote seemed like a throwaway comment, it creeps back into my mind…
When Rachel Jarman Myers, a Jewish educator, works with children in Jackson, Miss., she typically asks the students if they know any Jewish people. Sometimes, one child raises a hand. But when she specifies that the person cannot be Myers herself, the child’s hand almost always goes back down. The Jewish population in Mississippi has…
NEW YORK — The Jewish Theological Seminary received a $2.67 million grant from the Avi Chai Foundation to implement its strategic plan at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education. JTS announced the funding this week for a Davidson School plan that includes providing resources to U.S. Jewish day schools, educators and leaders in…
In the most ambitious attempt to import American-style higher education to Israel to date, the country’s first liberal arts college will open its doors this fall. The four-year degree program at the new Shalem College, located on the Jewish Agency’s campus in the East Talpiot neighborhood in Jerusalem, will teach a broad curriculum like those…
It all began at 5 a.m. one day in February 2013, in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Crystal City in Arlington, Va. That’s when Ken Gordon and Yechiel Hoffman realized that the time was ripe for a grassroots overhaul of Jewish education. The two were guests at the North American Jewish Day School Conference,…
Usher Bixenspan’s regular attire includes a black hat, a black coat and peyes, but for one afternoon in June, he wore a maroon gown, a graduation cap and a big smile. Bixenspan, 20, was part of the first graduating class of B’Derech, an academic program geared toward ultra-Orthodox Jews. The goal of B’Derech — Hebrew…
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