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Degrees or Direction?
Esau and Jacob reconcile. Photo: Francesco Hayez.
JNS.org – Who do you think is more likely to succeed, a yeshivah student with limited secular education or a university graduate with a degree? I imagine the statistics would confirm that the latter usually do better in terms of salary packages and income.
But increasingly, we are seeing a shift in that divide. A woman in South Africa recently shared her experiences in the workplace on LinkedIn, and it elicited a huge response in the online community. Esther Ekoko had several degrees but couldn’t find a job for years. She explains that employers are no longer interested in degrees but in experience, initiative and the skills an individual brings to a company.
She acknowledges the importance of education, but as a formerly unemployed with multiple degrees, her fortunes improved when she learned two digital skills: copywriting and data analysis. Her advice to job-seekers was that a degree is not enough; learn a skill and network.
This week in Parshat Vayishlach we read the dramatic story of the reunion between the estranged twin brothers, Jacob and Esau. Jacob’s messengers report that Esau is coming with murder on his mind, seeking to avenge Jacob’s procurement of the birthright and the blessings of their father, Isaac. Jacob prepares for war should it be necessary. He also prays to God for his family’s safety and employs a significant diplomatic initiative by sending his brother a huge gift of hundreds of animals stretching for miles.
Where did Jacob acquire so much wealth? The answer is that after working for his father-in-law, Laban, for 20 years, he left with enormous numbers of livestock. His gift to Esau was a fraction of what he had amassed in the farming business.
But Jacob was a yeshivah bucher, a student whose education was exclusively in Torah. He is described in the Bible as “a dweller of tents,” a reference to the proverbial “Tent of Torah.” Could this naive yeshivah student rival his brother Esau, who never stepped into a yeshivah and was a man of the world? Yes. When Esau protested and begged Jacob to keep the large gift he had sent him, Jacob declined and said he had all that he needed. Jacob was a very wealthy man.
May I be so bold as to suggest that we are now seeing many such “Jacobs” today, whose main education was studying Torah and who have done exceptionally well in a broad variety of businesses. We can debate over whether Talmudic study has sharpened their minds to succeed in business, or it is the blessings from God above (or both), but the bottom line is that the sands are shifting, and we should take note.
John Major was the youngest prime minister of England in the 20th century. Only much later did he reveal that he was a high school dropout. Guess what, he wasn’t impeached.
Now, I’m not suggesting that we raise a generation of dropouts, but we could use a rethinking and reassessment of our educational system. Is it working? The disrupters are making huge changes in today’s world. Perhaps we need some disruption in our educational system, too.
We are currently witnessing a serious breakdown in the world of higher education with many of our students becoming so “liberal” as to lose all common sense. Traditional family values are despised, and every type of “alternative” lifestyle is praised—all in the name of enlightenment and a so-called “progressive” philosophy of life. People would do well to heed the advice of scientist Carl Sagan, who was the first to advise us to “keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out!”
And, of course, the Palestinian agenda has been adopted by many American students who are completely ignorant of the history of the Middle East and have no idea which sea or river they’re chanting about. It may as well be the Mississippi. They simply get caught up in the popularity of the campus movement of the day. Today, “Free Palestine” is the flavor of the month. I hope by next year they get back to saving the whales or the ozone layer.
Albert Einstein famously said that “education is what you’re left with when you’ve forgotten everything they taught you in school.” We need values just as much as we need facts. It’s more important to be a mensch than to have a master’s.
And when you consider the raw, blatant and brazen antisemitism on college campuses today, we could do with a serious reset and rethink. No wonder talk show host Dennis Prager advises parents not to send their kids to college. Just look at what the deans of the top Ivy League universities had to say last fall about calls of genocide on their campuses regarding Jews. That it depends on the “context!”
Maybe we should all take a leaf out of Jacob’s book and pay more attention to the study of what’s really important in life. Who knows? We may become millionaires, too.
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Top Teachers Union Votes to End Alliance with ADL Over Israel Support
NEA Headquarters in Washington, DC. //WikiCommons
On Sunday, the National Education Association (NEA) voted to cease its relationship with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), citing the latter’s defense of the Jewish state.
The policymaking, 7,000-member assembly of the nation’s largest teachers’ union approved “new business item 39,” a measure that resolved: “NEA will not use, endorse, or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or its statistics. NEA will not participate in ADL programs or publicize ADL professional development offerings.”
In response to the decision, the ADL called it “profoundly disturbing, that a group of NEA activists would brazenly attempt to further isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical, antisemitic agenda on students.”
The ADL declared: “We will not be cowed for supporting Israel, and we will not be deterred from our work reaching millions of students with educational programs every year.”
Cautioning that “there’s an internal NEA process that deals with issues like this, and it is far from a completed process,” the ADL vowed: “We will continue to call out this antisemitism and prioritize our Jewish students and educators.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a consistent and influential critic of Israel’s right to exist, praised the teachers union’s rejection of the ADL.
“We welcome the NEA’s vote to stop exposing public school students to biased materials provided by the Anti-Defamation League due to its long history of spreading anti-Palestinian rhetoric,” CAIR said in a statement.
“The ADL has only become worse under its increasingly unhinged director Jonathan Greenblatt, who has repeatedly smeared and endangered students in recent years,” the group said. “This principled move is a significant step toward fostering respect for the rights and dignity of all students in public schools, who must receive an education without facing biased, politically-driven agendas.”
In a post Wednesday on X, ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote: “The answer to the surge in antisemitism in our classrooms isn’t to exclude the Jewish community from the conversation. Anti-Israel activists within @NEAToday cannot poison U.S. classrooms with politics. @ADL‘s priority is, and has been, to support Jewish students and educators. Our nation’s school systems should have access to the best resources for education on the Holocaust and antisemitism.”
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‘Transparently Antisemitic’: Google Founder Sergey Brin Blasts UN in Internal Company Forum
Sergey Brin of Google
(Source: ReutersConnect)
Google cofounder Sergey Brin criticized the United Nations in a company forum, calling it “transparently antisemitic” after the release of a report that accused Google and other tech firms of enabling Israeli military operations in Gaza.
Brin was responding to a UN report that claimed companies including Alphabet, Google’s parent company, profited from what it called “the genocide carried out by Israel” by providing cloud computing and artificial intelligence services to the Israeli government and military.
“Throwing around the term genocide in relation to Gaza is deeply offensive to many Jewish people who have suffered actual genocides,” Brin wrote in a discussion thread on a Google DeepMind employee forum. “I would also be careful citing transparently antisemitic organizations like the U.N.”
The report was the brainchild of Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. The Trump administration has accused her of antisemitism and has called for her removal, saying she has demonstrated consistent antisemitic biases in her work and has unfairly singled out Israel.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the US was imposing sanctions on Albanese under a February executive order targeting those who “prompt International Criminal Court (ICC) action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.”
In a post on X, Rubio accused Albanese of waging “political and economic warfare” against both nations and asserted that “such efforts will no longer be tolerated.”
Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. The position authorizes her to monitor and report on “human rights violations” that Israel allegedly commits against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Albanese has an extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and rationalize Hamas attacks on the Jewish state. In the months following the Palestinian terrorist group’s Oct. 7 atrocities across southern Israel, Albanese accused the Jewish state of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people had been killed in the Gaza war as a result of Israeli actions.
Google has faced internal uproar over the company’s $1.2 billion Project Nimbus deal with Israel. The deal has faced sustained criticism from human rights activists and some Google employees, who argue the technology could be used to enhance Israeli military operations and surveillance of Palestinians. According to a recent UN report, the agreement provided Israel with key cloud and AI infrastructure after Hamas launched its deadly October 7, 2023 attack against the Jewsih state, killing approximately 1,200 people and prompting a large-scale Israeli military response in Gaza.
Google has previously punished employees who protested the company’s relationship with Israel. After a wave of internal demonstrations in 2024, CEO Sundar Pichai issued a companywide memo urging staff not to use the workplace to debate political issues.
In the months following Oct. 7, Israeli defensive military operations in Gaza have led to the deaths of more than 57,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants. Hamas, the terrorist group that runs the Gaza Health Ministry, has repeatedly fabricated casualty statistics in the past.
The UN report accused US tech firms of exploiting a lucrative opportunity created by the conflict and Israel’s need for digital tools. It singled out Google and Amazon as being complicit in Israel’s so called “genocide” in Gaza.
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US Clamps Sanctions on Israel-bashing UN Rights Monitor Albanese
Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The Trump administration has imposed sweeping sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, citing the UN official’s lengthy record of singling out Israel for condemnation.
In a post on X, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions under a February executive order targeting those who “prompt International Criminal Court (ICC) action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.” He accused Albanese of waging “political and economic warfare” against both nations and asserted that “such efforts will no longer be tolerated.”
“Today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt [International Criminal Court] action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives,” Rubio announced on X/Twitter.
“Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated,” declared the Trump administration’s top foreign affairs official. “We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.”
Rubio concluded: “The United States will continue to take whatever actions we deem necessary to respond to lawfare and protect our sovereignty and that of our allies.”
The decision to impose sanctions on Albanese marks an escalation in the ongoing feud between the White House and the United Nations over Israel. The Trump administration has repeatedly accused the UN and Albanese of unfairly targeting Israel and mischaracterizing the Jewish state’s conduct in Gaza.
Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. The position authorizes her to monitor and report on alleged “human rights violations” by Israel against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Last week, Albanese issued a scathing report accusing companies of helping Israel maintain a so-called “genocide economy.” She called on the companies to cut off economic ties with Israel and warned that they might be guilty of “complicity” in the so-called “genocide” in Gaza.
Critics of Albanese have long accused her of exhibiting an excessive anti-Israel bias, calling into question her fairness and neutrality.
Albanese has an extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’ attacks on the Jewish state.
In the months following the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Albanese accused the Jewish state of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people had been killed in the Gaza war as a result of Israeli actions.
The action comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington, where he has received a warm reception from the Trump administration. Netanyahu has been meeting with US officials to discuss next steps in the ongoing Gaza military operation.
Gideon Sa’ar, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Israel, commended the Rubio announcement with his own post on X/Twitter, exclaiming: “A clear message. Time for the UN to pay attention!”
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