Steinhardt-backed group looks to seed 20 new schools, while other charter supporters call vision ‘misguided.’
Principal Maureen Campbell, with students at Brooklyn’s Hebrew Language Academy Charter School, the ‘vanguard’ model for a $3.2 million group promoting a national Hebrew charter school movement. Michael Datikash
by Julie Wiener Associate Editor
The race to establish a national Hebrew charter schools movement has officially begun, igniting a growing, and fierce, debate about the vision and purpose of schools that could potentially revolutionize the American Jewish education landscape.
While only three Hebrew charter schools exist right now, and the oldest — the first of two “Ben Gamla” schools in South Florida — is just in its third year, a new effort backed by a partnership of major Jewish philanthropists such as heavy-hitters Michael Steinhardt and Harold Grinspoon plans to see at least 20 additional Hebrew charter schools starting up by 2015.
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From Manbo Sallie to Gumbo Ya-Ya, Jews, shamans in mystical common ground.
Sallie Ann Glassman, Jewish, is now a Voodoo priestess in New Orleans.
by Jonathan Mark Associate Editor
In Haiti, the Other World is this one. Everywhere in the night are the dead — the gede — and their spirits.
In the wreckage of the earthquake, in that heavily Christian-Voodoo nation surely some whispered Psalms, words born in Hebrew, now shared, a crying from “out of the depths.” It is an island punished by nature but not God forsaken. Many Haitians believe that even before the rescuers arrived, God was with the mourners on the mattresses in the dirt, and on the pieces of cardboard that pass for mattresses. - Read Story -
Tel Aviv — A year ago if you were a star lawyer looking for a position with an Israeli firm, chances are it would have been a waste of time. As the U.S. economy swayed in financial crisis, companies stopped hiring. But over the last few months that’s changed. - Read Story -
Charges that the New Israel Fund supports Israeli civil rights groups that played a key role in providing information highly critical of Israel’s role in the Gaza war last year have sparked a spirited, and nasty, debate over the proper role for civil and human rights groups in a democratic state.- Read Story -
Does vocal support for Israel give public figures a pass on just about anything else they say?
Case in point: A controversy that started Jan. 20 when popular conservative radio broadcaster Rush Limbaugh made a critical comment about Wall Street bankers, apparently linking them with Jews, escalated the next day when Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman issued a press release calling on Limbaugh to apologize and asserting that the media personality “reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote.”- Read Story -
