At a table in the corner of Olam Jewish Montessori’s oversized classroom, a flour-covered 4-year-old chats nonstop as he mixes dough for challah. In another part of the room, a 3-year-old boy counts colorful Chanukah candles in Hebrew as he slowly places them in a menorah. A teacher is showing a third child a map of Paris while he toys with a model Eiffel Tower in his hands.
Daniel Ozer-Ross studies hard. He does his homework. And it’s not enough.
U.C. Berkeley’s Jewish Student Union includes groups such as Challah for Hunger, Bears for Israel and the Jewish Business Association.
I have a Jewish daughter in 12th grade, which means one thing: college applications. The fact that she is applying is a given; my husband and I have followed the long-standing Jewish tradition of brainwashing our children into believing that college is nothing more than grades 13 though 16.
In Austria and Poland recently, I couldn\’t seem to get away from students, scholars and just plain interested folks who were taking or teaching summer programs in Jewish studies.
The relationship between American and Israeli Jews is changing. For most of Israel’s history, the American Jewish community was larger, wealthier and more powerful than its “poor cousin” in the Middle East, but now the differences between the two communities have greatly narrowed. More Jews are living in Greater Tel Aviv than in Greater New York, and Israel, like the United States, is one of the world’s most developed nations.
Some 6,000 young Jewish leaders applied for slightly more than 1,000 spots at a European education and youth assembly to be held in Paris. Those who lost reserved spots at next week\’s conference will be the first invited to the next event of the European Council of Jewish Communities, according to a statement by the organization. The participants from across Europe will converge on Disneyland Paris April 3-4 for the ECJC\’s inaugural Jewish Education and Youth General Assembly.
Thirty University of California Jewish studies faculty members asked the Orange County district attorney to drop criminal charges against 11 Muslim students. The faculty members, from seven University of California campuses, are the second Jewish group to come out in support of the students, who have been charged with disrupting a February 2010 speech by Israeli U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California, Irvine. The Jewish Voice for Peace organization also supports dropping charges against the students.
A student has brought a federal civil rights lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley, saying the university did not protect her from being attacked because she is Jewish. Lawyers for Jessica Felber, 20, say the case, filed in U.S. District Court in Oakland, Calif., on March 4 against the university, the regents of the University of California and their ranking officials, is the first of its kind.
There are a lot of differences between what Mars Academy in Encino promises and the offerings of a typical secular day school. Every student will have a cubicle instead of a locker. Individualized mini-lessons from a teacher will replace lectures. And it will be housed in a synagogue. “Our situation is quite unique,” said Andy Mars, the school’s founding director.
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