Reflections of a Day School Graduate, One Year Out

By Amram Altzman May 26, 2014

  I’ve written before on my day school education and its different aspects, critiquing how it taught me (or perhaps should have taught me) to look at my history and my past; I’ve also offered what can perhaps be best described as a back-handed compliment to my Jewish education. Now, as someone who has been…

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Dear Jay Michaelson: We Can’t Afford To Leave Hillel

By Amram Altzman March 24, 2014

In his recent article in the Forward, Jay Michaelson argues that students who feel marginalized by the increasing tendency of right-leaning major Jewish organizations to air only those views which toe their institutional lines should vote with their feet and leave. This works well in theory for institutions like the Jewish Museum, which recanted its…

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In (a Somewhat Surprising) Defense of Jewish Education

By Amram Altzman February 3, 2014

I am a product of thirteen years of primary, elementary, and secondary Jewish day school education. I’ve been enrolled in a Jewish day school since I was three years old, and the idea of starting my school day at nine in the morning and ending at 2:30 in the afternoon is totally foreign to me….

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“Real” Rape

By Meggie O'Dell October 14, 2013

When my roommate at USC, a film student with a pink streak in her hair, edited a documentary on rape, I remember the ambivalence I felt. This issue, I thought, was a closed book: a mandatory assembly on rape and consent, massive turnout for Take Back the Night demonstrations, “yes means yes and no means…

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Jewish seminaries doing it right (and by it, I mean ‘it’) [Sex!]

By David A.M. Wilensky February 1, 2012

Big news, folks. Three American Jewish seminaries have been pronounced “sexually healthy:” Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform seminary with branches in Cincinnati, New York City and Los Angeles Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the — you guessed it — Reconstructionist seminary in Philly Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative seminary in New York City The Religious…

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