More in ‘Education’

Because I like to torture myself and revisit decisions long made, I often wonder whether we should have sent the girls to Jewish day school. I fell madly in love with a school called Hannah Senesh, in Brooklyn, a school I felt wasn’t hyper-competitive, grimly obsessed with “excellence,” insular, self-satisfied, or attractive to the kind ...

• An op-ed in the Jerusalem Post posits that President Barack Obama is “oblivious to African and African-American debts to the Zionist movement.” In case you are too, the paper lays them out in detail. [JPost]
• Commenting on Switzerland’s decision to ban the construction of minarets, a blogger points out that “though Islamophobia is driven ...

My seven-year-old was recently telling me about a third-grade power play. At lunch in the cafeteria last week, one little Queen Bee (let’s call her Girl X) imitated a less-popular girl’s speech impediment. After mocking her for a while, Girl X asked Girl Y, “Why don’t you talk right?” Girl X’s best bud snickered appreciatively.
“And ...

The saga of Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum reached one of its final chapters late last week, when the university’s president, Jehuda Reinharz, announced he’ll soon step down. The controversy started in January, when the Brandeis board of trustees, facing a steep plunge in endowment and fallout from the Madoff scandal, voted to close the ...

• Speaking to a half-empty room at the U.N. General Assembly yesterday—many delegates, including those from the United States, walked out—Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke out against the “Zionist regime” responsible for “genocide,” and the “small minority” who dominate the world with “racist ambitions.” [JTA]
• Israeli P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas still ...

• In an Al Jazeera interview, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates advised Arab governments to “strengthen their security capabilities” as a deterrent to Iran. [AFP]
• But when asked about America’s “double standard” toward Israel’s nuclear capability, Gates defended the U.S. posture. [JPost]
• A federal judge ruled free-speech protections did not prevent New York City from ...

Breaking news: the point of Jewish education is not to bore kids into confusion about their Jewish identities, leading them to, at best, channel their ambivalence into postmodern indie rock projects like David Griffin’s Hebrew School and/or later force their own kids into the same fate out of some resentful sense of “tradition,” while their ...

• A Beliefnet blogger wonders why he’s “not reading or hearing more from the Jewish community about the inglorious representation” of Jews in Tarantino’s latest film. [Beliefnet]
• The obvious answer: he’s not paying attention. Besides our own takedown, the Los Angeles Times rounds up a plethora of disturbed Jewish reactions to Inglourious Basterds, and Slate’s ...

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by secular parents in Lawrence, New York, one of Long Island’s Five Towns, which claimed that their Orthodox-dominated school board had decided to close the district’s nicest elementary school in hopes of selling or leasing it to a yeshiva. (Six of the seven elected school board members ...

Hey, poli-sci majors. Discuss: should public services—let’s say schools—be governed by the people who pay for them, or by the people who use them? That’s the question raised by a federal lawsuit filed yesterday by a group of parents in Lawrence, N.Y., one of Long Island’s famous Five Towns, where the school board is dominated ...