The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 By Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein Princeton University Press, 323 pages, $39.50 What if most of what we thought we know about the history of the Jewish people between the destruction of the Second Temple and the Spanish Expulsion is wrong? This intriguing premise informs The…
Deciding on a preschool is a big step for any parent. More than just teaching the ABCs, preschool is a place where children learn how to take turns, follow directions and figure out the world around them. Also, as parents, we want to make sure we find a safe, supportive environment for our little ones….
Americans, Jewish and otherwise, have long gone to Israel to learn about Judaism. But now many are going to learn about learning. In recent years, American educators have had growing opportunities to gain a window into the Israeli education system. The programs have somewhat different aims, but all foster a dialogue between educators from Israel…
As the mother of three boys, I appreciate the irony in suggesting that my kids could possibly benefit from having their eyes permanently locked onto screens and their thumbs flashing furiously across tiny keyboards. “Screens off” is a shout heard often in our house (shouted by me, of course). But social media aren’t all bad….
Rabbi Owen Gottlieb believes that the future of Jewish education is in games — both video and analog, like card and board games. Gottlieb, 38, is a doctoral candidate in education and Jewish studies at New York University and is the director and founder of ConverJent, which designs and develops games for Jewish learning and…
After finishing my first year of college and returning home happily to see my family and friends, I have been thinking about the level of education given at the university level and the preparation that secondary schooling gives in the United States. The result: we need to change the way we educate children in our…
A new study on anti-Semitism, commissioned by the German Parliament, came to the distressing, widely publicized conclusion that 20% of Germans are “latent” anti-Semites. But buried deep in the report is an assertion that might be even more troubling: Holocaust education is inadvertently fueling German anti-Semitism, making it worse. The study concluded that “anti-Semitic stereotypes…
In an earlier post I touched upon the subject of education, writing that Russian Jews of a certain age often view college as a pressure cooker for liberal propaganda. I find that, in addition to this one-sided view, many Russian Jews both old and young approach the term “liberal arts” with general skepticism, if not…
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