Diane Ravitch Flunks Hebrew School
By Daniel Treiman
Noted historian and education expert Diane Ravitch is weighing in on New York City’s planned Hebrew language charter school. And, unsurprisingly, this champion of civic education and e pluribus unum — and ardent opponent of multiculturalist cant and other centrifugal forces — is not pleased by this latest effort to enlist the public schools in the service of yet another particularist agenda.
She writes in the Daily News:
Our public authorities have forgotten that the public pays for public schools to advance public purposes. Among those purposes are: teaching kids their rights and responsibilities as American citizens; teaching them to live and work with others of different cultural backgrounds; and preparing them for higher education and for the modern workplace, where people of diverse backgrounds interact.
It is the job of family, the community and religious institutions to teach children about their heritage. The job of public schools is to teach children a common civic culture and a shared commitment to democracy.
In a city with hundreds of different ethnic and cultural groups, we should not be encouraging the creation of schools that are specific to a single non-American culture. That way lies separation, segregation and the fraying of the bonds that hold us together as Americans.
Of course our public schools should teach foreign languages. We should expect students to learn a language other than English. If there is a critical need for speakers of Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Chinese and other languages - and there is - then school officials should make sure to hire enough language teachers to offer these languages in middle schools and high schools.
If the goal of the Hebrew Language Charter School is to strengthen the religious identity of Russian and Israeli Jews, then it should be a private school. If the goal is to teach Hebrew to a broad variety of students, then the Regents should encourage the teaching of Hebrew in the regular public schools. And the same goes for schools that promote Chinese, Russian, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and other world languages.
Read the full article here.
September 2, 2008, 5:27pm
Stop the Presses: Ha’aretz Discovers Jews on Upper West Side (But the Times Beat Them to It)
By Daniel Treiman
Writing in Ha’aretz, Marco Greenberg offers an ode to Jewish life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and drops the following bombshell: “Even the New York Times has recently picked up on the UWS-Jewish connection.”
Greenberg goes on to observe that the “Upper West is perhaps the last spot on earth where people walk rather than drive.” Clearly, he has never been to the Upper East Side.
December 12, 2007, 2:48pm
Only in New York: Hanukkah Subway Attack Was a Multi-Ethnic Mash-up
By Daniel Treiman
As the alleged victims of the attack tell the story to the Daily News, the four of them boarded a Brooklyn-bound Q-train after celebrating Hanukkah at a bar in Manhattan. They were carrying a menorah and dreidels. A larger group of young straphangers shouted “Merry Christmas” at them, to which 21-year-old Angelica Krischanvich responded, “Happy Hanukkah.”
Next, Krischanvich told the News, “[One woman said,] ‘You can’t say that, we are Catholic.’” Krischanvich continued: “That’s when two guys stood up and showed us their Jesus tattoos. They started yelling at us and telling us we have no savior.”
“I started to yell back when one of them spat in my face. I didn’t let it bother me, and I told him, ‘Jesus turned the other cheek,’ and that is when the fight started.”
“They said, ‘You dirty Jews, you killed Jesus on Chanukah, you should all die,’” Baruch College student Maria Parsheva told the News. She said a member of the other group pulled a knife and waved it close to her face.
The News reports that three of Hanukkah revelers suffered bruises and cuts in the fracas.
The Daily News reports that police wound up arresting 10 members of the larger group, charging them with various offenses, including assault, menacing and inciting a riot. The police are reportedly still investigating whether the incident was a hate crime.
Here’s where the story turns crazy New York multicultural:
Advertisements
Advertisements
