The Hebrew Language Academy in Brooklyn was ranked 27th among the 150 charter schools in New York City by the city’s Charter School Center. The academy, which grabbed headlines in 2013 when the city Department of Education gave it an “F” grade, earned high marks in the most recent round of state tests. Students at…
I was signing the lease to my new apartment in Israel when my landlord asked to see my passport. He looked down at my work visa, which was pasted on a page inside, and then looked back up at me. “Oh,” he said. “This is a very bad name in Israel.” My last name, Zeveloff,…
OHR YEHUDA, Israel (JTA) – During working hours, while his 4-year-old son is at nursery school, closes the door to his small home office — less to keep out the noise than to prevent his mother-in-law from walking in on him while he’s watching pornography. It’s not as outlandish as it sounds: Watching X-rated films…
Photo: Larson Harley A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. As the musicians began playing the first strains of Sergei Prokofiev’s classic children’s symphony, “Peter and the Wolf,” on the stage of the Steven Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan on March 15, the hundreds of children in the large, awe-inspiring sanctuary stopped their…
A new Hebrew charter school is scheduled to open in suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul in September. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Agamim Classical Academy in Hopkins, Minn., will be the first U.S. public school to offer a focus on both the Hebrew language and classical instruction, a pedagogical approach “that emphasizes grammar, rhetoric and logic.” It…
Photo by Naomi Zeveloff As a million people gathered in today’s Paris march, French Jewish immigrants stood in solidarity with their co-religionists abroad, first at a post-Sabbath rally outside the French Embassy in Tel Aviv and then on Sunday at Jerusalem’s City Hall. Hundreds of French Jews gathered in a conference room for the Jerusalem…
Photograph by Jon Wunder Gift No. 3 The holiday season is upon us, which for many means a time of social gatherings, family, friends and traditions both religious and secular. This time of year brings me back to my youth, when I believed December was the time the Jews celebrated Hanukkah as well as Passover…
A newly published book, Norman Berdichevsky’s “Modern Hebrew: The Past and Future of a Revitalized Language,” is an excellent survey of its subject. In just 200 pages, Berdichevsky manages to touch succinctly but informatively on nearly every aspect of Zionism’s successful revival of Hebrew as the spoken language it had not been for two millennia…
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