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Students who switch between day school and public schools find their Jewish identities tested

This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with teens across the world to report on issues that impact their lives.

(JTA) — In 9th grade, Jonathan Korinman transferred to a specialized public high school in the Bronx after spending the previous nine years in private Jewish day schools. 

After leaving The Leffell School, a pluralistic Jewish day school in Hartsdale, New York, Korinman notices that he feels less connected to his classmates at High School of American Studies at Lehman College, his public school in the Bronx, than he did to his Jewish day school peers.

“When I was in a Jewish school, everyone felt connected with each other because of their connection to God or even just to Judaism,” said Korinman, a junior. “Without a God, or any form of Judaism in this public school that I’m in, there’s nothing tying each one of me and my classmates to each other.”

The differences that Korinman notices don’t end after last period. His home life is different, too. His family used to practice Jewish rituals on a regular basis thanks to his school, but now a family Shabbat is less frequent. 

“Through Leffell, we used to get challah every Friday, and that was an incentive to have a family Shabbat ritual, with the candles, kiddush and everything,” Korinman said. “Ever since I left the school for 9th grade, we don’t do that as much anymore.”

Switching school systems like this is common for many Jewish families in many communities, where there are significantly fewer options for Jewish high schools than for elementary and middle schools. While this transition can impact the way students choose to practice their Judaism individually, it also has an influence on the practices that their families choose to partake in at home. 

Enrollment in Jewish middle school — excluding haredi or Hasidic yeshivas — ranged from 19,000 to 21,000 students in the 2018-2019 school year, while in high school the numbers dropped more than 20%, according to a study by the Avi Chai Foundation of all day schools. Enrollment dropped by over 3,000 students from 8th to 9th grade. 

For some teens, the switch can be unsettling, although they often learn new skills and perspectives that they hadn’t needed to draw upon in their parochial schools.

Like Korinman, junior Shayna Garner attended the Modern Othodox Robert M. Beren Academy in Houston, Texas until high school, when she switched to Xavier Academy, a non-religious private school.

Lexi Hecht lights Shabbat candles in her home. (Jamie Hecht)

Since second grade, Garner has participated in the Bnei Akiva program, a Zionist youth movement, and even though she does not got to a Jewish day school anymore, she is still an active member and counselor of her group in Houston.

Garner also participates in the Jewish Student Union at her non-religious high school. 

“Every other Thursday, a rabbi comes to our school and brings us food,” Garner said. “We talk about upcoming holidays and Jewish other topics in general. The rabbi makes it really fun with questions for us and activities for us to do.”

Garner enjoys answering her non-Jewish peers’ questions about Judaism.

“My friends are very curious about my religion so I love teaching them about Judaism,” Garner said.

Some Jewish day schools are committed to helping their students transition to a public middle or high school. Columbus Jewish Day School in Columbus, Ohio offers fifth graders a unit with advice on moving on to public middle school, making new friends and maintaining a Jewish identity in their new schools.

“Our kids are academically and emotionally prepared,” Jenny Glick, director of enrollment management at the elementary  school, told the Columbus Jewish News in 2021. “That is not to say that transitions aren’t a challenge. The kids know that change can be hard and that is OK. They have the skills and support built in for success.”

Similarly, students at the Lippman School, a Jewish elementary school in Cleveland, are “coached in skills to help prepare them academically for middle school, as well as building general self-confidence and preparing them for a new and diverse learning environment,” according to the Cleveland Jewish News. 

For students who make the opposite switch, from non-Jewish to Jewish day schools, a new school can strengthen their Jewish identity. 

Lexi Hecht came from public school to the The Leffell School halfway through 9th grade, owing to the appeal of in-person learning during the pandemic. Although Judaism was not what originally drew Hecht to the school, it has become a significant part of her life.

Before coming to the school, she celebrated Jewish holidays at home, but never learned the full meaning behind them. Hecht incorporates a lot of what she learns at school into discussion at home and feels confident that she will be able to help her brother when he has the same transition in the coming year. 

“I feel a lot more connected to Judaism now because I’ve learned about where we come from and why we celebrate the way we do,” Hecht said. “I teach my family a lot of what I learn at school about the meaning behind the holidays and other traditions. When my brother comes to the school next year I’ll be able to help him and be a resource that I wish I had had.”

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The post Students who switch between day school and public schools find their Jewish identities tested appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Black Jews seek renewed solidarity to fight hate after Bondi Beach

In the backlash against Israel following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack, many American Jews put away Stars of David or avoided wearing yarmulkes in public, fearing they would be targeted in antisemitic violence. The burgeoning anti-Zionist protests on the left, coupled with emboldened right-wing antisemitism during the Trump years, shattered a sense of security that many Jews believed they had finally achieved in America.

But with antisemitism showing no sign of abating — most horrifically in the deadly Hanukkah attack at Bondi Beach in Australia on Sunday — the reticence among Jews to express their identity may be dissipating.

That renewed sense of empowerment and pride — even at some risk to personal safety — may open an opportunity to renew alliances with others committed to combating hate. Shoshana Brown, the co-founder of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, says she would welcome the return of a Civil Rights Movement–style partnership between her Black and Jewish communities.

“The only people who reached out directly to me after Bondi Beach were two African American Muslim women who I have been doing anti-Islamophobia and anti-antisemitism work alongside of for over two years now,” Brown said.

In that time, mainstream Jewish organizations and white Jews generally (or “white-presenting,” since in recent years the idea of Jews as white is itself being re-examined) have focused on antisemitism to the exclusion of other anti-hate work, she said.

“They were all in for anti-Black racism and George Floyd and all that. But as soon as Oct. 7 happened, all the money, all the resources, everything turned to fighting antisemitism,” she said. “It’s like white Jews can’t walk and chew gum.”

Brown and other Black Jews point out that unlike their white sistren and brethren, they do not have the option of hiding their identity from those intent on spreading hate — with people who would attack Jews likely to be the same as those who would target Black people.

“I’m a woman, I’m Black, I’m an immigrant. I have an accent. Being a Jew is the least of my problems,” said longtime Boston publicist Colette Phillips.

Phillips, who converted to Judaism not long before the 2023 attack. “I wear my Magen David because I did not become Jewish to hide my Judaism,” she said using the Hebrew term for Star of David, adding, “If people have a problem with that, so be it.”

She too has noticed a re-embracing of Jewish identity, if only in a sampling of one.

“As a matter of fact, today, my fiancé — he happens to be white, Ashkenazi Jewish — wore his kippah, because, he said, ‘Look, you’re wearing your Magen David out.’”

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Although there is no shortage of evidence that antisemitism has been rising in recent years, starkly in the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue murders in Pittsburgh and Charlottesville’s 2017 Unite the Right rally, it remains difficult to measure precisely. Even the definition of what constitutes an antisemitic attack has been fiercely debated, with some arguing that protests against Zionism or Israel’s war in Gaza are not attacks on Jews for being Jewish.

And Jews find themselves on each side of that divide, with organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace among the strongest critics of Israel.

Brown said the split is also reflected in how Jews respond to adversity, with some anti-Zionist Jews nonetheless embracing their religiosity as others sought to hide it.

“I actually have seen that part of the Jewish community dig deeper into their Jewish roots,” she said. “More people wanting to be rabbis, more people wanting to do Torah study, more people wearing a kippah, more people looking to Jewish practice in hopes of finding interpretations” supporting their activism.

If antisemitism is difficult to measure, there is one constant regardless of how much it has increased: There was never a time it did not exist in America.

The same is true of racism.

Nicky McCatty, who has experienced both racism and antisemitism as a Black Jew, was a longtime Boston area resident before moving back to his childhood home of Brooklyn at the start of the pandemic.

There, he said, he noticed white people were no longer crossing the street as he walked toward them on the sidewalk. Maybe New Yorkers weren’t as racist.

Then he realized he was now using a walker, making his six-foot frame look more like five-six — meaning he was no longer the stereotypical scary Black man.

“I might not be catching some of the stuff that I otherwise would if I still looked like a strong 50-year-old,” said McCatty, who is 73 and wears a hamsa necklace and can hardly conceal his Blackness.

Like antisemitism, racism hadn’t gone away. And he wasn’t hiding anything.

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The post Black Jews seek renewed solidarity to fight hate after Bondi Beach appeared first on The Forward.

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Amnesty International Finally Acknowledged Israeli Victims, and the Media Looked Away

Partygoers at the Supernova Psy-Trance Festival who filmed the events that unfolded on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo: Yes Studios

Two years. That is how long it took Amnesty International, one of the world’s supposedly leading human rights organizations, to formally acknowledge in a report that on October 7, 2023, Hamas committed horrific crimes against the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

These are facts Jews did not need Amnesty to discover. The mass murder, sexual violence, hostage-taking, and brutality were documented in real time. The evidence existed. The testimonies existed. The crimes were undeniable and should have been reported immediately by any organization claiming to defend human rights.

Instead, Amnesty chose a different path. From the outset, it framed Israel as the primary aggressor while sidelining, minimizing, or delaying acknowledgment of the atrocities committed against Israelis.

Worse still, just one year after the massacre, Amnesty released a report accusing Israel of committing genocide. To reach that conclusion, the organization stretched and distorted the definition of genocide, while conspicuously avoiding any serious accounting of how many Hamas terrorists were killed in the fighting. The result was not rigorous human rights reporting, but a document shaped to fit a predetermined narrative.

For Amnesty International, evidence mattered less than preserving a false genocide narrative. When irrefutable proof of crimes against humanity committed on October 7 surfaced, the organization chose silence. The reason is obvious: acknowledging those crimes would have disrupted the carefully constructed narrative designed to strip Israel of international sympathy.

A report detailing Hamas’ crimes was originally scheduled for release in September 2025. Its publication was delayed after internal opposition within Amnesty International, with critics reportedly arguing that even a belated acknowledgment of Hamas’ atrocities might benefit Israel in the court of public opinion, particularly given its proximity to ongoing ceasefire negotiations.

Amnesty International presents itself as an impartial humanitarian organization committed to defending all victims of human rights abuses. Yet this episode reveals how internal politics were allowed to override that mandate. Israeli victims were acknowledged only when doing so could be carefully timed and controlled to avoid disrupting a preferred narrative. That selective moral calculus further erodes the organization’s already questionable credibility and claims of impartiality.

Even with the delay, the mere fact that a major human rights organization had finally documented the crimes committed against Israelis should have been newsworthy in its own right.

Instead, many of the same media outlets that rushed to amplify Amnesty’s deeply flawed genocide accusation against Israel have remained conspicuously silent about its report detailing the crimes against humanity Israelis suffered on October 7.

The contrast is difficult to ignore — and speaks volumes about which victims are deemed worthy of attention, and which are not.

Major outlets, including CNN, the BBC, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press, remained silent on Amnesty International’s new report, despite immediately amplifying its genocide accusation just one year earlier.

Had the media outlets that so eagerly promoted Amnesty’s deeply flawed genocide report been committed to basic journalistic standards, they would have rigorously examined its distortions and misuse of the term genocide. At the very least, they would have also reported on Amnesty’s documentation of Israeli victims. Their refusal to do so tells a disturbing story: one in which editorial judgment determines not only which stories are told, but which victims are allowed to exist at all.

When human rights organizations and newsrooms decide whose suffering deserves recognition — and when that recognition is granted only if it is politically convenient — they do more than mishandle a single report. They corrode public trust, hollow out the principles they claim to defend, and turn the language of human rights into a tool of selective erasure.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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The Missing Context: Media Distort the West Bank Terror Threat

Illustrative: Palestinians run during clashes with Israeli forces amid an Israeli military operation in Jenin, in the West Bank July 3, 2023. REUTERS/Raneen Sawafta

Compared to the terror threats emanating from numerous fronts, including Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, the international media often downplays or dismisses the dangers Israel faces from the West Bank.

After the October 7 massacre, Hamas made no effort to hide its intentions to open a front in the West Bank, calling on Palestinians to take up arms against Israel.

In 2024, Israel faced over 18,000 incidents of terrorism, according to the National Public Diplomacy Directorate. The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, thwarted 1,040 incidents in the West Bank and Jerusalem in 2024, with an additional 231 significant terror incidents reported.

In 2025, the threat persisted. In February 2025, a terrorist from the Nablus area of the West Bank triggered a series of explosions on buses in the Tel Aviv area. Fortunately, the explosives detonated when the buses were empty, causing no injuries.

In September, a deadly terror attack at the Ramot Junction in Jerusalem killed six innocent people and injured 21 others. The terrorists came from the West Bank.

On November 29, a terrorist hurled an iron rod at the windshield of a car on Route 5, a highway in the northern West Bank. Miraculously, no one was physically injured, but the incident underscores the threat targeting Israelis.

The security challenge is real and ongoing. It targets Israelis, no matter where in the country they are.

After the ceasefire went into effect in the Gaza Strip in October, analysts found that Hamas and other terrorist organizations began reorganizing their operations in the West Bank as a way to continue their so-called “resistance.”

For these reasons, on November 26, the IDF launched Operation Five Stones, a counterterrorism operation specifically aimed at countering threats in the northern West Bank.

Naturally, terrorist groups condemned the operation. That didn’t stop the AFP from reiterating the press releases from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Counter-terrorism efforts by the IDF have proven successful.

In the first nine months of 2025, 22 terrorism incidents were carried out by Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank, in comparison to 90 in 2024. With the launch of the new operation, the IDF is strategically operating in specific locations in the West Bank that have become hotspots tied to previous terror attacks, including Jenin, Tulkarm, Nur Shams, Tubas, and Tammun.

These cities and villages have become operational hubs for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Iranian-backed groups, producing everything from roadside bombs to shooting cells to coordinated plots targeting Israeli civilians across the country.

Me’ata, a Palestinian media center, claimed that in October 2025, there were 356 “popular resistance actions” in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, including 16 incidents of planting and detonating explosive devices, mainly in the Jenin and Tubas areas. One of those explosions in Tubas left two IDF soldiers injured.

Jenin is perhaps the media’s favorite West Bank location to cover, consistently referring to it as the “martyrs’ capital.” What most outlets leave out, however, is that the name reflects the city’s role as the origin for more than one-third of terrorist attacks during the Second Intifada. The next time you read “martyrs’ capital,” know that the journalist is really referring to terrorism.

The IDF began intensively operating in Jenin in January 2025, following a terrorist attack carried out by terrorists from the Jenin area that left three Israelis dead.

During the current operation in Jenin, the IDF eliminated two terrorists claimed by Islamic Jihad. The shooting was documented on film, and an investigation into whether the officers took the correct action to mitigate harm to themselves has been launched, as is proper in a case where there are questions over whether individuals violated the IDF’s rules of engagement and code of conduct.

Several major outlets, including CNN, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, however, reported the incident without stating in the headline that the two individuals killed were not ordinary Palestinian civilians. but terrorists. This omission leaves readers with a distorted impression of the event and obscures the context of ongoing terrorist activity in Jenin.

Sky News went so far as to suggest the two were not terrorists at all.

The terrorist threat Israel faces from the West Bank is not theoretical or isolated, nor did it disappear after the October 7 terrorist attacks. Had the IDF not continuously acted to prevent further attacks, Israelis would be facing a far deadlier and more coordinated terrorism campaign today.

After October 7, Israel vowed never again to let the country or the Jewish people face such devastation and insecurity. A secure Israel after that massacre means dismantling terror networks before they can carry out mass-casualty attacks, not after. It means denying Hamas and Islamic Jihad the ability to embed in civilian areas, build explosives factories, or dispatch terrorists into Israeli cities. In a post-October 7 reality, counterterrorism is not optional. It is the prerequisite for any genuine stability, security, or peace.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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