New York Mayor Bill de Blasio personally called Orthodox leaders asking them to support his effort to retain control over the city’s schools in exchange for soft-balling a probe into the state of secular education at yeshivas, according to internal emails obtained by the New York Post. The emails from late June support a report,…
More than half of the yeshivas investigated by the New York City Department of Education over the past two years are not providing the required amount of secular education to students, according to a Department of Education letter released today. The Department visited 28 schools and wrote that of that number, 11 are providing the…
Political considerations prompted city hall officials and state legislators in New York to intentionally delayed the release of a report about the city’s inspections of yeshivas, according to an investigation released today. “Political horse-trading unquestionably occurred,” said Margaret Garnett, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation and Anastasia Coleman, the Special Commissioner of…
Read this article in Yiddish here. Imagine a world where “evil informants” are “sharpening their teeth,” where they fight to take children and “drag them into the abyss.” Holy books are engulfed in flames. Scary men in suits burst into classrooms unannounced and steal toys. Children are taught profanity for hours each day. Large metal…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Are Jews a people or a religious community? This reductive question has been debated for more than two centuries, since the time of the Jewish Enlightenment. Its stakes are particularly high with regard to Jewish education. Religious subjects have an old and fixed place in the Jewish…
It was at a Purim party last year that Rivka Yeker, a student at DePaul University, met a 20-something woman like herself, who taught at a unique, recently established school for young Jewish children. The Workmen’s Circle’s Sunday school, Yeker learned, stressed Yiddish culture and social justice, and focused on Israel hardly at all. Yeker…
The arrival of Passover brings about the need to outline the guiding principles of what was – and may still be – the largest Jewish denomination in Israel: orthodox secularism. This comes in spite of the fact that over the years this denomination hasn’t bothered others (and for the most part not even its own)…
Textbooks on secular subjects in Israel are infused with religious Jewish content, according to a review of 80 books published in the past 10 years conducted by the Israeli parents group the Secular Forum, reported Haaretz. The group called the use of religious themes to explain secular subjects a “systematic and ideological move” to “reshape…
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