Reviewing textbooks and state-imposed curriculum standards for content offensive to one’s community has been standard practice among minority advocacy groups at least since the 1980s. Given the elaborate network of Jewish communal organizations that attempt to fend off group defamation, it’s surprising that the first Jewish organization dedicated to reviewing textbooks and state curriculum standards was founded only four years ago.

My 7-year-old daughter, Josie, is crazy-competitive. At 3, whenever she lost a game of Candyland, she’d ricochet off the furniture like a screaming pinball, bellowing in fury for 20 minutes. She’s always wanted to be the winning-est, the smartest, the quickest. And that’s a big part of why I decided not to enroll her in a gifted program. After reading a bunch of research on the effects of labeling kids “smart” and “gifted,” I feared they’d only play into her worst win-at-all-costs tendencies. The girl’s so driven, I feared she’d wind up bulimic by the third grade and a plagiarist by the fourth.

When Israeli filmmaker Pazit Lichtman, a self-described “village girl from Ashkelon,” a coastal town just north of the Gaza Strip, arrived at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival with her film Willingly, she realized how far she had come from home. Extracting boxer shorts and aftershave from the festival gift bag, Lichtman was reminded that she ...

In New York City in May 1942, the Yiddish Scientific Institute—known then and now by the transliterated Yiddish acronym YIVO—announced a memoir contest for members of the aging remnant of the estimated 2.5 million Eastern European Jews who had crossed the Atlantic during what scholars call “The Third Migration”—roughly, 1880 until a nativist Congress slammed, ...

So, a Cantonese girl and a Jewish guy walk into a Hong Kong dreidel manufacturer…No, really. We did. And it wasn’t easy.
As elsewhere in China’s manufacturing universe, mistrust and secrecy are rife in the shadowy world of dreidel production. American importers zealously guard the identities of those Chinese suppliers who provide swindle-free, dependable-quality goods. Then ...

A few weeks ago, Abraham Geiger College in Berlin opened the Jewish Institute of Cantorial Arts, Europe’s first academic program to train Reform cantors since World War II.
Germany was the birthplace of Reform Judaism, and it has a rich cantorial history, though it looked for a while like that history had ended with the ...