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A new curriculum brings adults with intellectual disabilities into Jewish learning
(JTA) — When he’s not working at the local dog care and boarding center, 24-year-old Raffi Stein-Klotz is usually playing kickball or tending to the garden at his residential facility in Boca Raton.
But once a week, Stein-Klotz can be found in an adult Jewish learning class series created specifically for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, like him and his housemates at JARC, the Jewish Association for Residential Care.
“We learn the book of Genesis,” Stein-Klotz, the son of two rabbis, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And we get to know how everything is in Hebrew and English, and every morning we say ‘boker or,’ ‘boker tov,’” referring to the Hebrew expressions for “good morning.”
Stein-Klotz’s class is possible thanks to a new curriculum from Melton, the adult Jewish education network that offers in-person and online classes. The program, called What’s Mine is Yours, aims to provide Jewish academic resources for adults with disabilities, who advocates say have few if any options for formal Jewish education tailored to their needs.
“There’s really not a lot specifically designed for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities to have a continued adult learning experience,” said Carol Morris, Jewish disabilities advocates coordinator at Jewish Family Service of Colorado. “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some educational programs that they could attend or be part of, but not really anything designed specifically for them as adults to do higher-level Jewish learning.”
The curriculum was developed in partnership with Matan, an organization that educates Jewish community leaders on how best to include people with disabilities. After a successful precursor curriculum with Melton took off in Atlanta in 2021, What’s Mine is Yours began piloting the Melton and Matan curriculum in 2023. Four cities are offering the curriculum for the first time this year.
The rollout comes as the Jewish world has otherwise made significant strides in some aspects of disability inclusion in recent years. (February is Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance and Inclusion Month, a global Jewish organizational initiative.)
“One of the things that’s so important here is the Jewish world, to a great extent, has embraced the importance of inclusion, the importance of adding ramps where there are stairs to get into the synagogue, to get up to the bimah in the front, they’ve thought about the ways to include people with disabilities,” said Morey Schwartz, international director of Melton.
But, he added, “Inclusion can’t just be about ramps. It has to be about giving them inspiration, education, engaging, thought-provoking materials that can give them also the ability to participate fully to the extent that they can to the enterprise of Jewish learning. It can’t be like some watered-down version of something else. That’s not what we’re doing.”
What’s Mine is Yours includes units about prayer, holidays, Shabbat and rituals that are structured to be accessible for adults with intellectual disabilities without giving up on the core elements of advanced Jewish learning: open-ended questions, engagement with original texts and group discussions. Lesson plans ask students to relate the ideas they encounter to their own lives, and materials include prominent visual markers to enable students who might have trouble accessing text-based materials to follow along.
The pilot class in Atlanta, in 2021, was supported by a local Jewish disability support network. “Then we got feedback: We should take this over, nationalize it, scale it up,” Schwartz said.
The result is a customizable system that can be used wherever Melton classes are held, such as synagogues, JCCs and Jewish federations — or in residential facilities, day programs, specialty organizations, adult camp programs, community centers and educational networks. It’s in use in nine cities, mostly in the United States but also in Cape Town, South Africa.
Each module in the curriculum is three lessons, but can be stretched over more classes if teachers prefer. The first collection of four adapted modules has been completed, and another 12 are still in process.
Subject matter includes the meaning and purpose of prayer; the Exodus story; the miracles of Hanukkah and Purim; symbols in Judaism; and marriage, divorce, and conversion in Judaism.
“There are suggestions made, and everyone can kind of enter at a different point of where their knowledge is,” said Judy Snowbell Diamond, director of curricular development at Melton. “In addition to the course book, there’s a faculty guide, which gives the faculty some suggestions as to how to modify it depending on the learners.”
At JARC in Boca Raton, teacher Harvey Leven’s class recently completed the “Sacred Cycles” module, where students learned about Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. During a recent class, which JTA viewed by Zoom, six students, roughly mid-30s and older, sat around a conference table. (The rest of the class was on a field trip to Orlando.)
In his class, Leven reviewed relevant terms with students like “atonement,” “repentance” and “self-denial.”
Leven also played a three-minute video where a narrator, speaking quickly, recapped the basics of the holiday. Before playing any video, Leven tells his students a few of the things they might see, and a few things to look out for.
“Some people participate a lot, and some never say a word,” said Leven.
Stein-Klotz said he counts himself as one of those quieter students.
“For me, it’s hard, because I have autism, and it takes my brain a little bit to get it,” he said.
Leven has worked in Jewish education for more than 20 years, teaching both children and adults. But teaching the Melton curriculum marks the first time he has adapted his teaching specifically for students with special needs.
“Sometimes, like today, the vocabulary in the material often needs translating for these students,” Leven said. “And so you have to spend some time helping the students to understand what exactly is being said there.”
It can be difficult to measure how much information is getting through to his students, Leven said.
“We don’t do tests,” he said. “Today, one or two barely said anything. So I’m hoping that something sinks in.”
Over the past two years of teaching from the What’s Mine is Yours curriculum, Leven has had a number of returning students. Having worked with them in the past, he is already familiar with their learning styles and with their personalities, which has been helpful in the classroom.
“Every one of those students has particular idiosyncrasies that I had to learn and to be able to work with in order to make this class meaningful and fun for them, enjoyable for them,” Leven said.
But he said he had identified challenges in executing the curriculum. Leven said he avoids the suggested physical activities, for example, because many of his students have limited mobility, and the space and shape of his classroom is not conducive to much movement.
And though the program seeks to be accessible to all, in practice, it doesn’t work for every person’s needs.
Alissa Korn is the mother of two adult daughters, including 27-year-old Jillian, who has intellectual disabilities and mental health challenges. After learning about the success of the adapted curriculum in Atlanta, Korn was inspired to introduce the What’s Mine is Yours curriculum to Jillian’s adult living facility in New Haven, Connecticut.
“My daughter, it wasn’t great for her, because she really learns best in a one-on-one setting,” Korn admitted. “And with adults raising their hands and talking over each other, it was very challenging for her.”
Still, Korn finds value in the program, and her family continues to support it at her daughter’s living facility.
“It doesn’t necessarily need to be the perfect match for my daughter,” Korn said. “It just makes me feel good to be involved in anything in the special needs world, where we can feel like we’re empowering people and making them feel good about themselves.”
Erica Baruch, Jewish disabilities advocates adviser at Jewish Family Service of Colorado, said just offering the program takes the burden off families like Korn’s.
“Oftentimes families don’t ask for things because they make the assumption that it wouldn’t be possible or it would be a burden on the community,” she said. “Learning is such a big piece of Jewish life.”
Stein-Klotz is exactly the kind of student Melton is trying to reach. He fondly recalls marking his bar mitzvah at 13, when his godfather, who is also a rabbi, taught him his Torah portion — the story of Noah and the ark. He recalls having fun, learning about the animals and getting to sing songs.
“It was great, because I had people helping me, and I remembered everything,” he recalled of his bar mitzvah. “Learning it was hard for me, and I didn’t want to do it, but I took my time and learned well, and I still remember it, and I’m still Jewish throughout this day.”
Now, he is able to play a helping role in his Melton course, which he said has been a great way to get to know his neighbors from JARC and from the garden.
“It’s great to see them in the Melton class and learn what their disability is and what their strong skills and what their weaknesses are,” Stein-Klotz said. “So that’s a good thing, so I help them with that, if I can.”
Stein-Klotz said he even helps some of his classmates who are new to Judaism or interested in converting one day.
“They make me feel happy and good and strong,” he added. “Like I’m helping people, or like a good mitzvah.”
The post A new curriculum brings adults with intellectual disabilities into Jewish learning appeared first on The Forward.
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Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him
Piers Morgan’s online debate about Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed containing allegations of Israeli dog rape was loud, chaotic and unenlightening — and I couldn’t stop watching it.
That’s a problem. Morgan’s format is a trap. On his YouTube talk show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, he pits people holding intransigent, often extreme positions against each other, goads them to yell at one another across Zoom, and positions himself as the voice of reason in the middle. It’s hateporn — addictive, and not reflective of reality.
And yet Piers Morgan Uncensored and many similar YouTube- and social-media based news programs are where people increasingly get their information and engage with controversial issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
These programs rack up views by persuading viewers there is no middle ground, no moderate position, no alternative to conflict. And their strategy is working.
The Kristof episode, which racked up 340,000 views in a day, is titled, “Torture Does NOT Work!” — all Morgan show names have one word in all caps and end in an exclamation point.
It begins with people shouting. “You are not a journalist!” Ana Kasparian, a commentator on another YouTube show, shouts at podcaster and online anchor Emily Schrader — before Morgan comes on to introduce the segment.
He quickly recaps the lurid details from Kristof’s New York Times oped, “The Silence That meets the Rape of Palestinians,” and a newly issued nearly-300 page Israeli report on Hamas sexual violence.
“As far as I’m concerned, the only cause is basic human decency,” Morgan says in his cool British accent, “If your first instinct about either report is to look for ways to smear them, you might have run out of that yourself.”
Yet the six deeply partisan guests spend the next 45 minutes smearing the reports, and each other.
Morgan’s introductory call for human decency is not a plea, it’s a ploy. He plays the mature voice of reason standing between the extremist pro-Israelis and the pro-Palestinians — not to persuade them to come to a moderate position, but rather to exploit the most virulent voices in order to generate clicks, while still claiming the cover of journalism. This approach causes real harm by giving extremists a megaphone, and a degree of exposure that all but guarantees that people actually trying to build a better future go unheard.
A recipe for drama
Morgan repeats this formula over and again. In an episode entitled, “Netanyahu CONNED Trump!” Dave Smith, a sidekick to Joe Rogan, accuses Israel of dragging the United States into the Iran war. In “I’m SICK of it!” commentator Megyn Kelly launches into a similar attack on Israel.
Morgan has had long interviews with white supremacist and proud antisemite Nick Fuentes (“What a crock of S***!”). In “STAND for Dead Soldiers!” Morgan hosted four Israelis at the extreme ends of the political spectrum and watched them fight when one refused to stand as a siren sounded to honor Israel’s fallen soldiers.
Not extreme or dramatic enough? How about the time Morgan hosted Crackhead Barney, a Black pro-Palestinian street activist, to explain why she harasses celebrities to get them to say, “Free Palestine.”
“I’m truly shocked/disgusted that @piersmorgan would have this nutjob & clearly unwell person to go on his show and even remotely try to talk about Palestine or the war,” wrote the Gazan-born activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib.
Alkhatib is a moderate Palestinian who works for a peaceful solution to the conflict. He has, unsurprisingly, not been on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Instead, Morgan’s choice of guests is calculated for maximum friction, a function of an attention economy that monetizes the time people like me spend watching the fights.
From ‘Animal House’ to Piers Morgan
Luring viewers this way isn’t exactly new. President Ronald Reagan called The McLaughlin Group, a current affairs program that ran on public television for 34 years beginning in 1982, “the political equivalent of Animal House”— more drunken frat house than graduate seminar. McLaughlin begat Crossfire, a CNN political debate program hosted by a younger Tucker Carlson that Jon Stewart once compared to pro-wrestling.
In 2025, Morgan, who came up in British tabloids before a long stint at CNN, moved away from traditional broadcast TV and went all in on social media and his YouTube channel.
His success on that platform is part of a larger shift in media from major institutions to independent personalities, and from actual news — the dutiful and expensive process of finding out and relaying what’s actually happening in the world — to opinion that spins itself as reporting, which is far cheaper and more entertaining.
That shift has come as audiences have moved from loyalty to long established institutions to following enterprising, independent personalities. The podcaster Joe Rogan has 20.9 million subscribers; Carlson has 5.6 million; Morgan’s show has 4.42 million subscribers and over 1.36 billion total views.
In other words, Morgan is not some guy some people watch now. He is what people will be watching in the future.
A bias toward extremes
That prospect should alarm us. Morgan’s shows rarely feature people working toward compromise or reconciliation. A Piers Morgan Uncensored discussion spotlighting the many civil society groups in Israel working toward coexistence? A show where he sits down with Arab and Jewish Israelis who share a vision for a common future? A segment that highlights the actual, albeit rare, instances of cooperation?
Pipe dreams. All that is also happening in Israel and the West Bank — but Piers Morgan Uncensored effectively censors it.
Compare that to Jon Stewart, who on The Daily Show last month conducted a long interview with the Palestinian and Israeli co-authors of The Future Is Peace, a book that calls for moving beyond violence and stalemate to a shared future. Same approach — a streaming interview on a hot-button topic, with an eye toward entertainment — but radically different editorial choices.
That episode garnered a mere 400,000 views. Morgan’s comparative millions of eyeballs may, in his mind, justify his guttersweeping approach to international conflict. And in his defense — and mine, for watching — it’s never boring. He can be a thoughtful and provocative interviewer, and his not-ready-for-primetime, self-created show allows him, when he so chooses, to platform voices that more mainstream venues overlook, like former Israeli Speaker of the Knesset and longtime peace activist Avrum Burg.
Alas, he stuck the erudite former statesman with a diehard evangelical and a firebreathing American Jewish conservative pundit. That episode is called, “A SHAME on Judaism!”
Whatever this is, it’s not journalism. But it is the future.
The post Piers Morgan is what’s wrong with media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and I can’t stop watching him appeared first on The Forward.
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Rashida Tlaib Introduces Resolution ‘Recognizing Ongoing Nakba’
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) on Thursday reintroduced a congressional resolution recognizing the 78th anniversary of what she described as the “ongoing nakba,” using the Arabic term for “catastrophe” deployed by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
The resolution, introduced on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, accuses the Jewish state of carrying out “ethnic cleansing,” “apartheid,” and “genocide” against Palestinians, language that many pro-Israel lawmakers in Congress and advocacy groups strongly reject as inflammatory and inaccurate. The measure also calls for renewed US support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an agency that has faced mounting scrutiny from Israel and several Western governments over allegations that employees participated in or supported Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
In a statement announcing the resolution, Tlaib argued that the so-called nakba “did not end” with the Arab-Israeli war in 1948 and continues today through Israeli military operations and settlement expansion.
“War criminal Netanyahu and his cabinet have repeatedly threatened to ethnically cleanse the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, annex the land, and permanently occupy it. Today, they are extending these same threats towards southern Lebanon,” she said, referring to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and military operations against US-designated terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. “As we mark the 78th anniversary of the Nakba, we honor all of those killed since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and all those who have been forced from their homes and violently displaced from their land.”
Activists often invoke the term “nakba” when discussing the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs following Israel’s War of Independence, many of whom left the nascent state for varied reasons, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. At the same time, about 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, primarily in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Tlaib’s resolution is co-sponsored by several prominent progressive Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), and Summer Lee (PA).
The move is likely to draw fierce criticism from pro-Israel lawmakers and Jewish organizations, many of whom argue the resolution ignores the historical context surrounding Israel’s founding and the 1948 war. Israel accepted the United Nations partition plan in 1947 to create two states, one Jewish and one Arab, while neighboring Arab states rejected it and launched a military invasion after Israel declared independence.
The resolution also calls for a so-called Palestinian “right of return,” a demand insisting that potentially millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees should be able to return to the land of Israel, a step that, according to proponents, would result in the abolition of the world’s only Jewish state.
“This immense trauma, including the loss of their loved ones and connections to the communities they grew up in, needs to be repaired. True peace must be built on justice and the inalienable right of return for Palestinian refugees,” Tlaib said in her statement.
While refugees are generally defined as those who flee a country out of credible fear of persecution, UNRWA uniquely defines Palestinian refugees to include all descendants of those who left the land, regardless of where they were born.
Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of the US Congress, has emerged as one of Israel’s loudest critics on Capitol Hill, repeatedly accusing the Jewish state of genocide and drawing rebuke from fellow lawmakers.
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Toronto Sees 50% Drop in 2025 Hate Crimes, Yet 82% of Religiously Motivated Attacks Target Jews
A member of law enforcement personnel works at the scene outside the US Consulate after shots were fired, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, March 10, 2026. Picture taken with a mobile phone. Photo: REUTERS/Kyaw Soe Oo
Even as Toronto recorded an overall decline in reported hate crimes last year, newly released data shows the city’s Jewish community continued to face disproportionately high levels of targeted antisemitism and violence amid an increasingly concerning social climate.
On Thursday, Toronto Police released its annual hate crime statistical report, showing that Jews accounted for 82 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes in 2025, compared to 14 percent targeting Muslims.
Even though the Jewish community makes up less than 3 percent of Toronto’s population, officials now warn that Jewish residents are 14 times more likely than other residents to be targeted in a hate incident.
With 81 anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded, Jews and Israelis were the targets of 35 percent of all reported hate incidents in the city.
Despite a 50 percent overall decline in reported hate crimes, from 443 in 2024 to 231 in 2025, Toronto has seen a 40 percent increase in such incidents so far this year compared with the same period last year.
Toronto Police Chief Myron Demkiw noted that, even with the overall decline, the Jewish community continued to be the primary target of hate-motivated offenses.
“We are steadfast in our commitment to confronting hate in all its forms and making it easier for people to come forward and report incidents of hate,” Demkiw said in a press release.
Because police-reported hate crime data only includes incidents that come to the attention of authorities and are later confirmed or suspected to be hate-driven, official figures likely underestimate the true scale of such incidents.
Over the past two years, Toronto authorities have expanded law enforcement capacity and resources to investigate hate crimes by establishing a Counter-Terrorism Security Unit and increasing specialized training for officers, while also strengthening Holocaust education initiatives and introducing digital literacy programs for youth aimed at countering online radicalization.
Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Vice President Michelle Stock called the latest statistics “deeply alarming,” warning of a broader reality of hostility that Jewish families across the city are confronting on a daily basis.
“Toronto prides itself on being a city where people of all backgrounds can live openly, safely and without fear. Those values are undermined when any community no longer feels secure expressing its identity in public,” Stock said in a statement.
“From synagogues to schools to public displays of Jewish identity, blatant attacks against the Jewish community are becoming more frequent and more brazen,” she continued. “Jewish Canadians are being targeted simply for who they are. No one should have to think twice about wearing a kippah, attending synagogue, sending their children to Jewish schools or participating openly in Jewish life.”
The city’s figures reflect a broader nationwide rise in antisemitism and anti-Israel hostility, with the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada reporting a record high in anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2025 for the second consecutive year, documenting 6,800 such cases across the country.
According to the latest report, antisemitic incidents nationwide increased by 9.3 percent last year, surpassing the previous record total of 6,219 set in 2024.
With an average of 18.6 incidents per day, this figure represents a 145.6 percent increase from 2022, before the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Early 2026 data already indicate the country is now on track to see its most violent year against the Jewish community in recent memory, with more violent antisemitic attacks recorded so far this year than during all of 2025, B’nai Brith Canada reported.
In total, 11 violent antisemitic incidents have already been recorded across the country since January, surpassing the 10 violent cases documented during all of last year
“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement.
“Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly, does not occur in a vacuum. It is what happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous,” Wolle continued.
Last week, a group of Jewish worshippers standing outside the Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue in Montreal was targeted in a drive-by shooting, leaving one person with minor injuries.
A week earlier, three visibly Jewish residents were targeted in a separate antisemitic attack when suspects opened fire with a gel-pellet gun, causing minor injuries.