As we collectively get ready to receive Torah, it seems an appropriate time to put up some thoughts on Jewish education. I don’t have children yet (and if my parents are reading this, no, I don’t have any immediate plans to), but I’ve been thinking about the Jewish education I would want to provide my hypothetical future children, and which elements of this would need to be provided in an organized setting outside the home. (From what I hear, once I do have children, I won’t have the time to think and blog about these things, so I’m doing it now.) Specifically, I’m interested in exploring models of organized Jewish education that are alternatives to Jewish day schools and conventional Hebrew schools.
If the existing day school or Hebrew school models work(ed) for you or your children, that’s just fine; I’m not trying to take that away from you (and I couldn’t even if I tried). I’m not suggesting that the models discussed in this post are right for everyone. In particular, I’m assuming that my children will be growing up in an actively Jewish home and an active Jewish community. I know this assumption doesn’t hold for all (or most) Jewish children, but maybe (or maybe not) it holds for your (current or future) children too. If you have thoughts on how to implement and/or refine these models, or you’re aware of existing programs already operating along similar lines, or you’re interested in participating in these sorts of things, please post in the comments. If you want to argue that day schools are the only conceivable option for serious Jewish education (not only in practice, but in theory), or that conventional Hebrew schools are just fine the way they are (or would be just fine after incremental inside-the-box improvements), please save your breath. More »
This has started to make the rounds today. Peter Beinart at the New York Review of Books.
The central argument:
For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
I don’t have much to add to what’s already been written at Tablet and Mondoweiss.
Chorus:
City of David, City of Peace
Criminal haven, den of thieves.
Spiritual knaves, as Jeremiah preached
We’re digging our graves with our arrogant greed.
The undivided, eternal, Come all, come one,
never mind the person behind the curtain.
The fix is in, the deal’s sealed, hon.
El-Ad can drill on and steal Silwan
Arab permits to build — you won’t see one
but strike ‘em down, they get stronger like Obi Wan
I’m game to come to Zion, but baby, get real, mon
no game; you can’t steal home like Neon Deion
What kind of pioneer relies on theft and con
your claims of pioneer’s straight frontin’ agwon
A real pioneer is creative, original
integrates indigenous aboriginals
my watchdog clock, tick tock, it don’t stop
I’m such a pioneer that my name is La Rock
You’re liars and thieves, a fake a crock
in the houses that you take in Sheikh Jarrah.
you’re ecstatic — you shock me like sweater static
spastic ’bout the land like heroine addicts
we’ll be the first to die like Crispus Attucks
grow uncontrolled — that tactic’s cancerous
I came into the door; I’ve said it before
I’ll block you like Emeka Okafor
You gladiate with child’s play like patty-cake, I’ll vaccinate
evacuate you, bat your best away like Shane Battier More »
Mazal tov to Jewschool’s own ZT, on the occasion of his marriage today to BR! ZT has blogged extensively about the elements that make Jewish wedding celebrations so joyous, from sheva berachot to shtick, based on experiences with many different semachot, and so we wish BR and ZT the joy of all those celebrations combined.
Before I get to the actual review of the Indie Yeshiva Pocket Siddur, it bears outlining some basic of my basic beliefs about Jewish prayer and how to make Jewish prayer accessible.
What is beautiful about Jewish prayer is the strucutre-poetry. There is the micro-poetry of the words, which is all well and good, but what’s so amazing, is the coherent structure of Jewish prayer, the macro-poetry. If you teach a Jew the strucutre, you can hang whatever you want on it and they will see the beauty in any service in any synagogue in the world.
PunkTorah, the organization responsible for this new entry into the siddur market, the Indie Yeshiva Pocket Siddur, begins from a different premise. Apparently, they believe that what is needed to make the siddur comprehensible to Jews in the pews is a punkification. They have punkified the siddur in two detectable ways. First, they have put a silly punk-looking cover on it. Second, they have stated in the introduction that they are punkifying it:
Who Are We?
Indie Yeshiva is a project of PunkTorah, a force for change by creating open source Jewish education…
Just a few days after “incitement day,” today’s protest in Sheikh Jarrah was far more tense that have been the protests for the past month or so. Y-net reports:
Violent clashes broke out Friday afternoon between left-wing activists and police forces in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.
About 30 protestors were arrested and one demonstrator was lightly injured. She was evacuated to the Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital in the capital, suffering from bruises.
…
At one point, about 100 protestors settled on the road leading to the Simeon the Just compound, which was recently inhabited by four Jewish families armed with a court order following the evacuation of Arab residents.
The police declared the protest an illegal gathering and ordered the protestors sitting on the road to evacuate themselves within three minutes. The activists refused to leave and were forcibly evacuated from the area.
In the same place where earlier this week the police protected 2 days of nationalist, pro-settlement celebration, it was clear today that those of us who do not share that sentiment do not have equal rights to express our views in the neighborhood. What a country.
A ruthless high school vocalist who will do anything to become a star, with a flighty over-dramatic moody side that gets her into constant boy trouble. A jerk of a varsity football player, whose well-hidden conscience only pesters him briefly between womanizing jags and throwing dweebs into dumpsters with his meathead buddies.
These, you call Jewish TV show characters?
So far as I can tell — and I’ve only been a fan of “Glee” for the past few months — the extent of the Jewish character content on the show is limited to elements like these: 1. Rachel Berry‘s got a rabbi she wouldn’t feel comfortable talking about sex to. 2. Noah “Puck” Puckerman‘s mom won’t let his live-in pregnant ex-girlfriend bring bacon into the house. 3. One of the cheerleaders tells Rachel she should move out of town — to Israel. 4. Puck tries to get into the pants of the newest popular girl in school, an African-American girl, by telling her “Jews and Blacks have a history of helping each other out.”
No bagels, no lox, no awkward Woody Allen neuroses (other than the high school kind), no outsider perspective (do Rachel’s two gay dads count?), no shysterism, no intellectualism, no kink, no classic Jewish stereotypical tropes.
Does this mean Jews really are so “white” in America now that being a Jew isn’t enough of an identity to set a TV character apart anymore? That random quick throw-away references to real Jewish culture (as opposed to stereotypes) are an easy way to spice up a figure who’s really just a generic Jock or Theater Star archetype, anyway?
Is there anything distinctively Jewish to the characters of Rachel or Puck that might say something about newer stereotypes of Jewish Americans? Maybe Puck is a tough-guy Sabra, or Rachel’s interracial, queer family is a reflection of Jewish social progressivism. At least they both have Mediterranean features — one point for non-Ashkenazi visibility?
And what to make of the characters named Artie Abrams (“the wheelchair guy”) and Tina Cohen-Chang (“the Asian punk-goth girl”)?
This is clearly not a serious sociological analysis. But like a good Jewish boy, I notice these things and start to wonder. You are invited to gleek out in the comments. Comments on multi-focal post-modern identity are encouraged to be written in verse.
Nashville, TN has been under water for a while now. While we all have read about what happened, like with so many disasters, we most likely won’t be hearing much about what happens in the aftermath. The clean up will be long, hard and extremely sad. Lives lost. Property destroyed. History forever lost.
You can help out by working with any number of organizations. Here are a couple Jewish orgs that are getting into the act:
The following is the better part of an email chain from the Jewschool contributors email list from the last two days. I have posted this for two reasons. First, I thought it was funny. Second, from time to time I see commenters here at Jewschool writing as though we have some kind of coherent editorial process or well-defined agenda. The manner in which we conduct these email exchanges should disabuse y’all of that notion.
Contributor 1:
I had to laugh when I saw this in the AJC Access newsletter:
“AJC launched its new, cutting-edge iPhone application—the first from a major Jewish organization. The AJC app, available free of charge in Apple’s App Store, allows iPhone users to stay updated on AJC news, blogs, videos, Twitter and more….”
The first? I’ve had an iPhone app for my website for about 2 years now. It’s not that hard and even I didn’t claim to be the first….
But it begs the question- if I’m savvy enough to use blogs, twitter and other social media, why would I need an app from AJC?
And if I’m already following all those feeds, aren’t I already getting sufficiently updated?
There are some things AJC does that I think are okay, and some are a bit well, you know. But it’s as if they invented the very notion of a Jewish App. And that theirs is useful…
AJC cutting edge? AJC doesn’t even know what its mission is. Its mission statement is like, three pages long. The whole real mission? All about scaring old people into giving money so the org doesn’t have to fold.
Reb Yudel:
On the other hand, an app to help distinguish between AJCongress and AJComittee might actually be useful…
Contributor 3:
How about the difference between the arukh hashulchan and the shulchan arukh?
The news that President Obama has nominated Elena Kagan as John Paul Stevens replacement on the Supreme Court has generated an enormous amount of excitement, both positive and negative. Kagan, who is Jewish, has been touted as everything from a slick move by the president to sneak in a progressive while satisfying the Jewish constituency that he’s really “on our side” (which of course just couldn’t be true, because we know he’s really an Arab-loving, anti-Israel security anti-Semite – that was sarcasm, for the witless, btw) to a cynical, typical Obama move which really shows just how non-progressive he is.
Because Kagan is young (In Supreme Court terms, although given that she’s just 50, in Jewish terms, also, which I always find funny, and am tickled to be able to say in terms of something other than “young Jewish leader”), she is likely to be an influence on the Court for a long time, making the stakes somewhat higher. Especially if she hangs in there as long as Justice Stevens, God bless him. More »
MAY 13th — Noa Raz, a Conservative Jew in her early thirties who lives and works in Tel Aviv, was physically assaulted early Tuesday morning by an ultra-Orthodox man at the Central Bus Station in Be’er Sheva for having the imprints of tefillin (phylacteries) lines visible on her arms.
She had woken up several hours earlier to pray and wrap tefillin, as is part of her daily routine. “I’m very pale, so the tefillin lines are still visible for hours afterward,” she said. While she was waiting for the bus to arrive, an ultra-Orthodox man in his forties stood next to her and stared at the lines on her arms. He asked her twice if the imprints were from tefillin. She ignored him at first, then admitted they were. At that point he grabbed her hand and began to kick and strangle her while screaming “women are an abomination.” She struggled, then broke free and ran to the bus which had just pulled into the station.
There were several bystanders present, though Noa Raz stated that the assault happened so quickly that none had time to react.
Raz arrived in Tel Aviv and sent out a message about the assault on Twitter. Dozens of people responded urged her to go to police to report what had happened. Raz contacted the police the following day, fearing that a similar incident would happen to another woman.
…
The Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) has been working with the Be’er Sheva Police and has insisted they treat Raz’s assault as the hate crime that it is. Anat Hoffman, Executive Director of IRAC, stated that the assault on Noa Raz for wrapping tefillin “should not be seen as an isolated incident, but as taking place within an atmosphere of growing violence toward and intimidation of women who seek to pray freely and equally. Too often these acts of violence are tolerated. The fact that this man thought it acceptable to attack a woman for performing a religious act in private is an example of the escalation of violence targeted against women and against religious pluralists in Israel. We at IRAC are pushing the Israeli police to take this investigation seriously.”.
Uh oh.. I think it’s ambivalence time again. The celebrations of modern Jewish victory and renaissance never seem to pass easily these days for the sensitive.
So we conquered the east side of Yerushalayim. So we reunified the city. So we redeemed and beautified ancient Jewish sites — the ones our ancestors wrote Psalms about, the ones buried under the trash of foreign occupiers, the ones we were only begrudgingly and situationally allowed any access to for 1900 years. So we walked the streets of our “Home Tree” — our axis mundi — fully in control of our time, our paths, and the relics of our forebears under our feet. But..
Isn’t war bad? Didn’t we start it? What about the occupation of the Territories that began that week? What about the theft of resources, the expansion of settlements, the disenfranchisement and repression that somehow still lingers more than 40 years later? What about Sheikh Jarrah?
Well, I agree. That which is awful cries out for repair. That which is closest to us takes precedence. I believe in working to change things. I believe in peace and I believe in fairness. That why I’ve been a contributor at this blog. But..
I also believe in celebrating your heritage and the ability to take charge of it. I once wrote a defense of Yom Ha-atsma’ut for Jewschool. It was lengthy and kinda moony. This is not that.
This is me angry. These are the kinds of stories that keep turning up this Yom Yerushalayim:
We have individuals who are supposed to be our communal conscience, and spokesmen who style themselves our communal protectors, making ridiculous obstructionist claims professing exclusive Jewish attachment to every dunam of the far-flung limits of the modern municipal boundaries of Jerusalem.
We have right-wing ultranationalist extremists dancing around the city through Palestinian neighborhoods, shoving their racism and their triumphalism in the faces of those they despise.
And then there are smug asshats like Juan Cole, who must know the facts better than to claim that Jewish history is fairy tales and Jewish heritage is a sham, but who instead chooses to publish this piece of Jew-baiting malarkey denying the place of Jerusalem in the Jewish past. He inexplicably claims that foreign domination equals the absence of living native culture, that the inaccuracy of traditional writings is more important to historiography than the fact that they were written in the first place, that political rule is the only form of cultural attachment, that the Palestinians are the real Jews, and that evidence that Yerushalmi history isn’t solely Jewish means that the tremendous Jewish chunk of that history is irrelevant.
It’s all well and good that Cole is attempting to counter the rhetoric of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, but you don’t get anywhere close to peace, justice, and reconciliation when you attempt to erase your fellows’ heritage. What you are doing, in fact, is using a particularly nasty method to try to have your side win.
And so it heartens me to read an account like this, from Letty Cottin Pogrebin of Americans for Peace Now. It’s nice to be reminded that there are Jews and Israelis who haven’t fallen to the pressures of the Antizionist left, the paranoid, parochial center, or the fascist Kahanist right. Some quotes from Israeli activists:
A young man then spoke up. “There’s a perception that the right cares about Israel, and we only care about the Palestinians. But you don’t have to build settlements in East Jerusalem to be a Zionist.”
Yet another young woman weighed in, “I want Israel’s flag to represent peace.”
A slender man agreed. “Ours is a Zionist movement,” he said. “We should show everyone there’s no paradox, that the flag of Israel represents the values of peace, not war, and we represent the majority of the left.”
It is unfortunate, believes branding guru Martin Kace, that the only sides of Israel shown by the Israeli government are tits and beaches which pretend they don’t rule over another people. It should be possible to develop a global communications platform for Israel that integrates progress, fun and modernity, while still acknowledging occupation and conflict with its neighbors. Possible? He has only 10 minutes to convince you.
This Thursday, May 13 at 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm, at Sweet & Vicious, 5 Spring St. (between Elizabeth and Bowery), New York. Doors open at 6:30pm, talk from 7pm to 7:10pm. Free admission, cash bar. RSVP on Facebook.
THE LITTLE IDEA is a 10-minute lecture by a single speaker, followed by drinks. No moderator, no long introductions and no Q&A. Co-sponsored by NIF’s New Generations.
It may seem a little early for a Sukot post, but the deadline is fast approaching to enter your bizarre modern version of the sukah in the Sukkah City: NYC 2010 exhibition. Apparently, if your design is selected, you get to build a weird sukah in Union Square.
Their elevator pitch:
12 radically temporary structures will be built in Union Square Park in New York City. Funded by us. Designed and built by you.
Register by July 1, enter by August 1, installed September 19-21.
Hoping to challenge not only New Yorkers’ notions about sukkahs but also the world’s, Joshua Foer has launched Sukkah City for this coming Sukkot. From September 19–21, a dozen experimental sukkahs will be constructed in Union Square Park, created by what Foer anticipates will be a mix of the world’s foremost architects and artists, though the competition is open to anyone, goyim included. “The idea is to take this ancient architectural identity and reinvent it and really see what we can do with it, to really push the boundaries,” Foer said.
For millennia, sukkahs have looked about the same. Three walls of varying dimensions and orientations with a roof made of organic matter—palm fronds, sugarcane, or cornhusks are among the common foliage—where more sky is visible than roof. A place of hospitality and reflection, it exists for just eight days. And it is within these relatively strict yet open-ended constraints that Foer and his partner on the project, critic Thomas de Monchaux, hope entrants will explore.
“Design is the search for constraints, so I think our expectation is that different designers will zero in on different aspects of the sukkah to produce something we’ve never seen before,” de Monchaux said. “We’re really hoping for a radicalized reaction to each of the constraints, though if someone wants to take them all on, we welcome that, too.”
Check out their slick site here. There, you can read about all of the laws of the sukah. Most are halachic. One is municipal:
There is no maximum area, except in NYC where any structure larger than 19 x 8 feet is not considered temporary by DOB.
PS. Did you know that you can use a whale or an elephant as one side of your sukah?
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Gavriel Meir-Levi who has served in the IDF and is active in American politics. He is currently involved in creating social media for a State Senate campaign and completing his forthcoming memoir OBAMADOX about working on the Obama Campaign. He loves iPhone Apps.
Today, as many Jews in Israel and around the world celebrate the (conquest) reunification of (East) Jerusalem, it might seem ironic to look at the current situationin East Jerusalem as an opportunity for peace. Many esteemed figures such as Elie Wiesel have proposed that the issue of East Jerusalem should be pushed off in to the future as far as possible, while on the other end of the spectrum Ed Koch offers us his recent comparison of Jerusalem to a New York City with East Jerusalem as its “Arab Borough.” I leave it to you the reader to figure out if he means Queens or Staten Island.
The above notwithstanding, I believe the idea of looking at East Jerusalem with a fresh pair of eyes has a lot of merit. Rather than forcing the East Jerusalem Arabs to pick sides in which at least some would opt to stick with Israel, why not grant them citizenship in BOTH the State of Israel and the Palestinian Authority? In stead of being at the center of a tug-of-war they could be a magnificent bridge between East and West. More »
Last night, I heard Prof. Jonathan Sarna give a lecture on Democratization in American Jewry in the years following the Revolutionary War. He explained, using a couple of fascinating examples, that in that period of time you start to see the waning of the authority of the synagogue, and the Jewish community more generally: break-away shuls, a Kohein marrying a widowed convert against the wishes of the shul leadership, and a learned individual finding halachic solution to issues involving the excommunication of intermarried Jews, against the wishes of the kahal.
During Q&A, someone asked about the relationships of the break-away shuls to the organizations from which they departed. Prof. Sarna explained that, in time, exterior threats would cause these groups to come together. I’ve heard a similar explanation about the relationship of the Hasidim to the Mitnagdim after the haskalah. The modern example given was an Orthodox Rabbi sitting on the bimah of a Conservative shul in Boston during Cast Lead, claiming that differences between them needed to be put aside when Israel was threatened.
I understood his point, but the example made me cringe. I remember there being some level of objection from within the Jewish community, even during Cast Lead, and it pains me that the best example for the uniting of Jewish community is around a mythic threat to Israel (which is not to say that I approve of rockets, either). It being erev Yom Yerushalayim, I’m also reminded of the mythic existential threat from ’67, but I digress.
We’ve done an OK job of covering a number of recent cases of civil rights problems in Israel (here, here, here). Over at Zeek, Moshe Yaroni sums things up beautifully:
Israeli democracy is under siege, and it’s no less stark than that. For years, the peace groups in Israel have been warning that occupation cannot co-exist with democracy without one eventually strangling the other. It is no longer a theoretical argument. More »
I wanted to write something witty about the parallels of chauvinism and machismo in the Middle East and professional kitchens but I just am totally baffled by the fact that Lebanon and Israel are fighting each other by cooking obscene amounts of falafel.
Lebanese chefs load up with falafel for Israel food fight
(AFP)
BEIRUT — A day after firing a 10-tonne hummus broadside in a food fight with Israel, chefs in Lebanon weighed in with another first for a Guinness record on Sunday — five tonnes of falafel.
More than 300 chefs mixed a ton of chickpeas with an equal portion of broad beans, adding onions, garlic, coriander, onion, pepper and cumin to concoct 5,173 kilos (11,381 pounds) of falafel, a deep-fried patty popular in Lebanon and many parts of the Middle East. More »
A ruthless high school vocalist who will do anything to become a star, with a flighty over-dramatic moody side that gets her into constant boy trouble. A jerk of a varsity football player, whose well-hidden conscience only pesters him briefly between womanizing jags and throwing dweebs into dumpsters with his meathead buddies.
So far as I can tell — and I’ve only been a fan of “
Is there anything distinctively Jewish to the characters of Rachel or Puck that might say something about newer stereotypes of Jewish Americans? Maybe Puck is a tough-guy Sabra, or Rachel’s interracial, queer family is a reflection of Jewish social progressivism. At least they both have Mediterranean features — one point for non-Ashkenazi visibility?
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