Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Sex-Ed Lockdown

Remember your old Hebrew school curriculum: Jewish ethics, Jewish history, Jewish laws and customs, Talmud Studies, Jewish sex? …Jewish sex? Right, there was no Jewish sex.

But this past weekend, Houston-area high schoolers had the rare opportunity to talk shop — that is, talk sex — from a Jewish perspective. The overnight retreat, “There’s Only 1U,” which was billed as “the sexuality and Jewish crash course,” was created by Rabbi Amy Weiss as a way of applying Jewish values to basic sex education.

Held at the Houston Hillel, the event was lock-in style – guys on one floor, girls on another – and included off-beat educational tools, like a “South Park” sex-ed episode, to get the conversation flowing.

Jewish mothers have that “my kid doesn’t do that”-type of attitude, Weiss, the executive director of the Initiative for Jewish Women told Houston area blog Believe It Or Not, but such is not the case according to an Atlantic Monthly article, which cited a trend of kids having oral sex at bar mitzvahs.

Now that’s disturbing.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version