The morning oration is like a normal university class: a professor, an engaging intellectual lecture and questions at the end. But the similarities between a regular college class and the new Hebrew University “Scientists on Trains” program pretty much stop there. The program, which was launched in November, has brought a number of the Hebrew…
The call came at 9 p.m. on a recent school night, caller ID informing me that it originated from SAR High School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where my youngest child is a freshman. Expecting a pre-recorded message, I was surprised to hear a familiar voice on the other end: It was the…
“Will you miss being a day school parent?” asked the head of school at Milken Community High School of Stephen S. Wise Temple, the largest non-Orthodox high school in the United States. This was last June. My youngest son, Danny, was about to graduate. “I am so done,” I replied. The words flew from my…
The first time I set foot in a day school, the principal, a soft-spoken man named Mr. Fishman, gave me a big black yarmulke to wear on my bare head, and I promptly threw it to the floor. At the time, my family was checking out the Orthodox yeshiva where I would start kindergarten a…
In 1985, I made a Rupert Holmes-style escape from the ghetto known as Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I had been deeply immersed in Jewish life, from conception until college, but as a freshman at Brown University, I was encouraged to explore, even fetishize, the secular world — to such a degree that I boasted about…
The decision to send the three of us kids to the Solomon Schechter School was, I’m told, a difficult one. My mother, who is a daughter of Holocaust refugees and a staunch Zionist, pushed for us to attend. My father, who came from a more typical American Jewish background, worried that we’d emerge from such…
Things have gone from bad to worse for the Hasidic Jews living in New Square and a few other Hasidic enclaves near the Catskills. A few weeks ago, we told you about the battle in Rockland County over a proposed kosher slaughterhouse that would be built less than a hundred feet from a residential neighborhood…
As Jewish day schools prepare to open their doors for the 2009–10 school year, there is only one thing beyond the well-being of their students that is on the minds of those in charge: the economy. The recession “has been devastating,” said Marc Kramer, executive director of RAVSAK: The Jewish Community Day School Network, which…
דער בעל־שׂימחה האָט יאָרן לאַנג געדינט ווי דער רעדאַקטאָר פֿונעם ייִדישן פֿאָרווערטס.
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