Opinion | The Hidden Costs of School Vouchers
How should Jewish schools weigh the need for autonomy against the lure of state subsidies? Some day schools, mostly non-Orthodox and in smaller Jewish communities, are already happily educating many children who do not identify as Jewish. Hebrew-language charter schools in cities like New York and Los Angeles straddle the boundary between public school and day school, with majority non-Jewish student bodies and a focus on language and culture rather than religion.
Education in Israel: Divided Schools, Divided Society
Students in each system have almost no contact each other. Thirty-five percent of Jewish students and 27 percent of Arabs said they have never interacted with peers from the other group.
James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief
When I was a teenager, there was a legend repeated in the Jewish schools of my hometown. If you somehow manage to get into godless Harvard, don’t go. But if, against your rosh yeshiva and rebbe’s advice, you actually go, whatever you do, don’t take biblical scholar James Kugel’s class. If you do, you’ll walk into Introduction to the Bible, see that the professor is wearing a yarmulke and assume the course is kosher. And, the story goes, you’ll walk out a heretic.
Yizkor Education
By Adina Rosenthal
British historian Sir Ian Kershaw famously wrote: “The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference,” a sentiment that provides...
Hannah Senesh, Golda Meir, and now Kate Bornstein
By Bonnie Rosenbaum
My introduction to Jewish heroes can be traced back to one amazing Barbie doll.
It was 1986, I was in 7th grade, and my...
Learning the Right Lessons?
By Symi Rom-Rymer
In a recent poll, 30% of Israeli Arabs, out of 700 questioned, don’t believe the Holocaust happened. As the Associated Press reported earlier...