In the past, many Southern colleges and universities had few, if any, Jewish students roaming their campuses. But recently schools below the Mason-Dixon Line have stepped up their recruitment of Jewish students. They offered scholarships, built centers for Jewish learning and socializing, and engaged the surrounding Jewish communities in their efforts. The Forward interviewed students…
Why Should I Care?: Lessons From the Holocaust By Jeanette Friedman and David Gold The Wordsmithy, 219 pages, $15 When I was in high school during the early 1990s, I needed very little prodding to study the Holocaust. Historical accounts of the horror and the depravity of the Final Solution, recounted by teachers, textbooks, documentaries…
Once a year, the eighth graders at a synagogue I’ll call Temple Beth Torah spend an afternoon volunteering at a soup kitchen. During the bus ride to the site, the teacher passes out a Talmudic quote about feeding the hungry and spends a few minutes trying to engage the students in conversation about the passage….
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…
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