Opinion

Opinions

Columns

Rethinking Our Ideas on Education

By:

David Glanzberg-Krainin and David Ackerman

We both graduated from excellent public schools and today live in suburban communities with outstanding public school systems. Our children -- six between us -- all attend private Jewish day schools. We have made that choice based on our families' personal commitments and values. While the school choice that we have made for our families involves sacrifice, we are blessed...

Columns

Support for Choice Means Results

By:

Howie Beigelman

Everyone knows the Orthodox community supports school reform for "parochial" reasons -- the strain on our household budgets from multiple tuitions at Jewish day school. But Orthodox support is about far more. It's about Jewish values. The poor and near poor in our society are trapped in failing schools. That's not right or fair. That was also the message of...

Editorials

Out of Egypt

We are watching the dramatic events unfold in Egypt with a mind-boggling mixture of fascination, empathy, awe and fear. It's not the first time that a people has risen up against an Egyptian ruler; we've been there and done that. And as a community that values democratic ideals, we can empathize with the passionate yearning for political liberty and economic...

Columns

On Chinese and Jewish Mothers, and Helicopter Parenting

By:

Rela Mintz Geffen

Five years ago, Ayelet Waldman dared to write an article in The New York Times saying that she loved her husband (the writer Michael Chabon) more than her children. For this, she was labeled a "bad mother," received rafts of hate mail and even death threats. The response was so vociferous and voluminous that she wrote a book about her...

Columns

Accepting Our Many Differences -- No Matter What!

By:

Rabbi Steven Greenberg

My grandma was the epitome of a babushka -- a loving, overly emotional Russian woman, and I was the apple of her eye. She called me "Stevenyu." For her, I could do no wrong. So when my mother learned that her first-born son, an Orthodox rabbi, named after her father who died in Auschwitz, was gay, she couldn't bear her...