At first glance, an open letter published in last week’s Forward seemed like business as usual. The letter, signed by about 70 Bay Area Jewish intellectuals including the biblical scholar Robert Alter and the poet Adrienne Rich, protests a decision by the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation to restrict its funding to groups and projects ...

Growing up, Mark Oppenheimer was always itching for a fight. He didn’t want the kind involving jabs and hooks—rhetorical skill and quick wit were his weapons—but, even so, neither his peers nor the hands-on-activity-loving teachers at his progressive elementary schools shared his inclinations. Salvation came in middle school, when he discovered the world of competitive ...

As part of a major restructuring effort, the Jewish Theological Seminary announced last week that its cantorial school, traditionally separate from the rabbinical school, will be integrated into the rabbinical school. Henry Rosenblum, the well-regarded dean of the H.L. Miller Cantorial School, will be laid off. The move provoked an outcry from the seminary’s cantorial ...

The reception area in downtown Manhattan’s Preschool of the Arts is a cheerful, modern space: dozens of self-portraits and paintings by children named Jem and Oliver and Esme crowd the walls. A small sign invites visitors to stop by the art gallery to see “action paintings created in the style of Jackson Pollock” and hangs ...

Having joined the ranks of the underemployed this spring, Dalia Samansky, 30, found herself trolling Craigslist for jobs in sales or marketing, maybe private-school teaching. “I got one interview, but most didn’t even respond,” she said. “I just sent lots and lots of resumes.” Samansky was frustrated—after all, she has five years of grad school ...

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.