From The Jewish Daily Forward:

Before sending her 6-year-old son, Charlie, off to day school in September, Brenda Hite wondered if she'd made the right decision. Neither Hite nor her husband, Tom, are Jewish, but the public school options in their hometown of Akron, Ohio, didn't enthrall them. So they applied to the local Lippman School, which impressed the Hites with its new global perspective and its energetic and experienced educators.

"Once we learned more about the Jewish culture and religion, and how steeped everything is in Old World values, the Lippman School became very attractive to us," said Hite, who, like her husband, grew up in a Christian household. Also, she said, "It didn't feel like Charlie would get the individualized attention at a public school that he would receive at Lippman."

Read the full article in The Jewish Daily Forward...

From The Sacremento Bee:

NEW YORK, Sept. 7, 2011 -- The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) announced the establishment of the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue (MCID), funded with a $2 million gift from New York philanthropist Howard Milstein, and the Paul Milstein family. The Milsteins have a long history of engagement with JTS. Irma Milstein chaired the Davidson School of Jewish Education and served on the JTS Board of Trustees. The gift from her family marks a second generation of relationship between the Milsteins and JTS.

The Milstein Center's invitation-only inaugural event will take place on Monday, Oct. 31, with His Eminence Kurt Cardinal Koch as the guest of honor. Cardinal Koch is visiting from the Vatican, where he is the President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, which includes the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.  This is Cardinal Koch's first trip to New York City in that capacity.

Read the full article in The Sacremento Bee...

From The New York Times:

The children filed out of yellow school buses and descended the stairs to the basement of a Jewish community center in Queens, where they put on plastic aprons and paper chef hats in preparation for a lesson on how to make matzo.

But the trip was not really about baking. It was a dose of religious education, offered free to public school students — during school hours, outside their school’s buildings — under a long-running program known as “released time.”

Read the full article at The New York Times...

From The Times Leader:

PHILADELPHIA — You can connect with lots of people on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and texts.Now, it seems, with the pope’s blessing, you can use all these media to make the ultimate connection.

On Jan. 24, the feast day of St. Francis de Sales — patron saint of journalists — Pope Benedict XVI issued a message titled “Truth, Proclamation, and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age.” He gave his blessing to the Facebook-Twitterverse and invited Christians “to join the network of relationships which the digital era has made possible.” Pretty hip. (Note: The pope has his own social-media site, Pope2You,).

Read the full article at The Times Leader...

From The New York Times:

From Berkeleyside:

A former Jewish student at UC Berkeley has filed a lawsuit against the university contending it violated her civil rights when it did not protect her against attacks from a pro-Palestinian student.

Jessica Felber filed the lawsuit in the Northern District Court on March 4, almost one year to the day Husam Zakharia, the head of Berkeley’s Students for Justice in Palestine, allegedly rammed her with a shopping cart filled with toys, according to the suit.

Read the full article at Berkeleyside...

From the New York Times:

District Attorney Tony Rackauckas of Orange County, however, disagreed — and filed misdemeanor criminal charges last week against the 11 student protesters, accusing them of disturbing a public meeting and engaging in a conspiracy to do so. 

Read the full article at the New York Times...

From The Jewish Week:

Jews don’t celebrate Christmas, but it feels like everyone else does. And this “December Dilemma” forces us, as Jews living in a Christian country, to confront some difficult questions.

First of all, what do Jews think of Christianity? This isn’t an academic question. When Christmas is front and center in streets, stores and television screens, religious differences become part of the family conversation. I can remember my own children at a young age asking me, in their own words, “why did the Jews reject Christianity?”

Read the full article at The Jewish Week...

From the Providence Journal:

By Richard C. Dujardin
Journal Staff Writer

Though she has celebrated Hanukkah with her Jewish in-laws on Long Island each year since she was married nine years ago, this week will mark a first for 37-year-old Shelley Feinstein.

“This is the first one I’m doing here, and that does add to the pressure,” the Johnston mother of two admits. “I want to follow the traditions, but also would like to add some of my own ideas.” 

Read the full article at the Providence Journal...

It's Thursday morning and 25 boys and girls are leaping on the spot in four lines, counting out jumping jacks in Hebrew.

"Echad! Shtayim! Shalosh!"

These are second grade students at the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Brooklyn, in which children - the majority of whom are not Jewish - study a large part of their curriculum in Hebrew.

When it opened last year, the HLA was only the second Hebrew-language charter school in America. Within a few years it could be among up to 30 such schools.

After the children reach 10, PE teacher Qayyim Shabazz shouts instructions in Hebrew to touch their shoulders, arms and legs or to run left or right.

Mr Shabazz points out the various ethnicities of his students.

"He's from Jamaica, he's from the West Indies, he's Jewish, those two are Mexican, she's from Haiti," he says.

Looking on admiringly, HLA principal Maureen Campbell says that most schools in her district are predominantly from one ethnic group or another but the HLA is diverse.

More than three-quarters of students have at least one foreign-born parent. About one-quarter of children come from Hebrew-speaking homes and one-quarter from Russian-speaking homes. Almost 40 percent of pupils are black.

Each class of 25 students in HLA, which will have 450 pupils from kindergarten to fifth grade by 2013, has two teachers, one who speaks Hebrew and one who speaks English.

Children have one hour of formal Hebrew instruction each day. Hebrew is also integrated into social studies, science, maths, music and physical education.

"There's no drill and kill," says Campbell. "No copying out words. It's total immersion."

Read the full article at The Jewish Chronicle Online...