Jewish education

The Moral Costs of Jewish Day School

As Jewish Ideas Daily nears its re-launch, we look back at some of our highlights over the last three-and-a-half years—beginning with Aryeh Klapper's day-school proposal, first published May 14, 2012.

The Decline of the Rabbi-Intellectual

The congregation-based scholars of yesteryear labored to make Judaism intellectually stimulating as well as emotionally stirring and politically applicable.  

Orthodox Schooling: What Do We Know?

80 percent of American Jewish day school students are Orthodox, but there is little research on the state of Orthodox education—because the Orthodox community has never funded it.

Eizenstat on the Jewish Future

In his new book on the Jewish future, Jewish diplomat Stuart Eizenstat sees Jewish destiny evolving in the friendly competition between the sovereignty of Israel and the pluralism of America.

The National Library

I counted on the National Library at the Hebrew University as my senior citizen’s refuge, my succor in my declining years, a protective womb that leads to a new learning.  But all this will soon change.

Reform of Tradition, Tradition of Reform

Max Lilienthal’s life provides a lens through which we watch American Judaism, Reform Judaism in particular, struggle with the consequences of its own idiosyncratic condition.

Max Lilienthal’s Aborted Return

In Bruce L. Ruben’s new biography Max Lilienthal: The Making of the American Rabbinate, about one of the pioneers of the American Reform movement, I was surprised to learn that Lilienthal almost made a second trip to Tsarist Russia.

Crisis in the Curriculum

In 1953, in a bold move, Israel passed a State Education Law.  Before then, Israeli education was run by political movements and parties which used their schools not just to teach the three R's but to indoctrinate as many unsuspecting youngsters as possible.

Yeshiva Revolution

Shaul Stampfer, one of Israel's foremost experts on Eastern European Jewry, is the most unlikely of iconoclasts.  A thin, quiet, unassuming man, he gives the impression that he would have been happy as a simple melamed (elementary school teacher) in the shtetls he describes.

Englishing the Talmud

According to a rabbinic tradition recorded in the Talmud (Shabbat 12b), God’s angels do not understand the Aramaic language in which the Talmud itself is mainly composed. As many a modern reader can testify, they’re hardly alone.