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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.”
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Staunch Israel supporter Coons expected to win Delaware Democratic Senate primary handily
(JTA) — Delaware incumbent Sen. Chris Coons, a longtime supporter of Israel, is expected to easily win Delaware’s U.S. Senate primary on Tuesday, despite criticism from party progressives.
Coons, a mainstay of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has repeatedly backed measures to bolster Israel’s capacity for self-defense. He also joined a bipartisan delegation to visit Israel immediately after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
But the senator has faced pushback in recent months for his refusal to back measures that would cut military aid to Israel.
This past spring, he was one of just seven Democrats to join Republicans in voting against a resolution authored by independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, which sought to stop the sale of military bulldozers to Israel. Coons was among just 11 Democrats who opposed a second Sanders resolution that proposed similar sales bans on massive bombs and other defense equipment.
Coons has served nearly three terms in the Senate. He won a special election in 2010, about a year after Joe Biden resigned to become U.S. vice president, and then went on to secure two full terms in 2014 and 2020.
In Tuesday’s primary, he will face off against artificial intelligence systems builder and historian Jeff Appelhans, naval architect and marine engineer Mary Louve and a former business executive who changed his legal name from Eric Hansen to E. No-Trump Hansen.
While Coons has earned endorsements from establishment Democrats, such as Delaware Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Gov. Matt Meyer, he has drawn criticism from party progressives for both his support of Israel and the financial backing he gets from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobbying group.
Of Coons’s opponents, the most vocal critic on Israel-related policy has been Appelhans, whose campaign priorities included ending U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Appelhans slammed Coons for voting against the Sanders bills, writing on his campaign site that “the liberal consensus moved to block the sales.”
Appelhans condemned Coons’s voting record on “moving armaments to Israel,” noting in a recent interview that “there’s never been a vote that he’s stopped” on this issue. He was speaking with Delaware Public Media last week as part of a series of candidate interviews.
Regarding the conflict in Iran, Appelhans slammed “Congress’ unwillingness” to challenge the president, noting that “there was very much a sense that Israel would be a staunch ally and they could sort of get this done really easily.”
In the same radio series, another candidate, Louve, expressed uncertainty as to “why we’re still backing Israel,” while acknowledging the country’s history as a U.S. ally.
“Is it worth us continuing to step up for a bully?” she asked. “It’s aggression that is unnecessary that’s continuing to escalate because we’re helping it.”
Hansen did not participate in these conversations, Delaware Public Media stated.
This summer Coons pledged to stop taking donations from the data company Palantir, which has come under scrutiny for its work with the Israel’s Defense Ministry, the U.S. military and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the nonprofit news site Spotlight Delaware.
Despite his more centrist reputation, Coons has had significant criticism for the Trump administration’s strategies in Iran. In his own Delaware Public Media interview, Coons accused the president of selling the conflict “as a cheap, quick war.”
While little polling data was available ahead of Tuesday’s race, the Polymarket predictions site gave Coons a 99.7% chance of winning as of Monday evening. In his last primary in 2020, Coons defeated a progressive opponent, Jessica Scarane, with nearly 73% of voter support.
Regardless of Tuesday’s outcome, the victor is expected to easily defeat the Republican challenger in the November general election, with the Cook Political Report deeming Delaware “solid” Democratic territory.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Noah Wyle wins an Emmy for playing one of TV’s most Jewish doctors
(JTA) — Noah Wyle on Monday night won his second consecutive Emmy for playing Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch on “The Pitt.” The win also marked a second victory for one of television’s more fully realized Jewish characters.
The actor won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for the HBO Max medical drama, which also won Outstanding Drama Series for the second year in a row. In his acceptance speech, Wyle recalled growing up in Los Angeles and said, “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do, and this is the only club I’ve ever wanted to join.”
For Jewish viewers, the significance of Wyle’s victory goes beyond the actor’s own Jewish ancestry. In the first season, Robby was seen reciting the Shema at one of his lowest moments, turning what might have been a throwaway piece of character background into an intimate expression of fear and faith.
In the second season, Wyle, who is also a writer and executive producer on the show, pushed that dimension further. An episode he wrote dealt with the trauma of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, while also exploring Robby’s complicated relationship with his Jewish faith.
Wyle has described Robby’s faith as something he is still “grappling” with — including the question of whether he has faith at all. The Shema scene, he said, functioned almost like a child’s primal plea for help.
Wyle was not the only Jewish winner of the night. Saul Metzstein, the Scottish Jewish director whose father was the prominent modernist architect Isi Metzstein, won Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series for “Slow Horses.” Metzstein had been competing against Wyle, who was nominated for directing an episode of “The Pitt.”
Those two wins were among the relatively few Jewish victories at this year’s ceremony. Jewish actors including Jason Segel, Lisa Kudrow, Harrison Ford and Hannah Einbinder were among the nominees but did not win in their categories.
“Nobody Wants This,” the Netflix show about a rabbi’s romance with a non-Jewish podcaster, was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series but lost to “Widow’s Bay.”
An Emmy was also awarded to a Jewish actor and director whose death in 2025 stunned the industry and a legion of fans. Rob Reiner, who was killed in December with his wife, Michele, won a posthumous Emmy for his guest role as a kind dispenser of business advice on “The Bear.” Reiner’s award was presented at the Creative Arts Emmys earlier this month, rather than Monday’s televised ceremony.
Reiner, before going on to direct Hollywood classics like “This Is Spinal Tap,” “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally” won his first two Emmy awards in 1974 and 1978 for playing Mike Stivic, the liberal son-in-law of Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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NAZA exposes Israel’s crisis of credibility over Gaza
More than two decades ago, when I was the The Associated Press bureau chief for Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli military called off an attack on a senior Hamas leader after learning at the last moment that family members and children were inside the targeted building.
What stayed with me was what happened next. The military sent a senior officer to my office to explain the decision.
This was during the Second Intifada, the murderous explosion of terrorism launched by armed Palestinians after Israel had offered the Palestinian Authority an independent state in over 90 percent of the territory it sought. Hamas leaders sent suicide bombers into Israel on a daily basis to blow up buses, restaurants, malls, cafes. I checked for explosives whenever I got into my car, perhaps with my little daughters, Maya and Noa.
Yet Israeli officials understood that demonstrating concern for civilian life was part of maintaining the country’s credibility. Maybe they also thought that concern for innocent life, even on the enemy side, was the Jewish thing to do. I want to believe this, as both a Jew and as a manager who had colleagues in Gaza, some of whom were hurt over the years.
That memory returned to me amid the uproar surrounding NAZA, the new documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who shared in the 2024 Oscar for No Other Land, a critique of Israel’s practices in the West Bank.
The new film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival and won the Special Jury Prize, is titled after the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage” (and is also a play on “Gaza”). It examines Israel’s targeting practices in Gaza through testimony from 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence personnel who allege the IDF used artificial intelligence.
Some of those soldiers, the filmmakers say, operated or helped design the AI systems at the center of the film. Their identities are concealed in various ways, yet their testimony portrays a disturbing picture about how technology, intelligence and estimates of civilian casualties intersected in decisions to strike.
The reaction in Israel has been ferocious. Culture Minister Miki Zohar – from the governing Likud Party led by Benjamin Netanyahu – has called the filmmakers traitors and raised the prospect of revoking their citizenship.
Former football star and prominent television personality Eyal Berkovic has similarly argued that loss of citizenship should be the best-case scenario for Israelis who harm their country. As the film moves beyond Venice, efforts to prevent its screening in Israel seem likely.
That reaction creates a sad irony. One of the strongest criticisms of NAZA is that its highly combustible testimony comes from anonymous sources – and that is a valid criticism indeed. Yet threats directed at the filmmakers offer a fairly vivid illustration of why soldiers and intelligence officers making explosive allegations about their own military might fear speaking publicly. The filmmakers say anonymity was necessary to protect people who could face serious consequences for revealing classified information. I can credibly assess they’d end up in jail.
Nonetheless, the anonymity remains a serious weakness. Claims that are this grave demand intense scrutiny, and viewers have limited means of establishing whether the witnesses held the positions they claim, possessed the knowledge they describe or represent the targeting system accurately. The IDF has challenged precisely this aspect of the film and rejected its portrayal of Israeli targeting practices.
That said, and not for the first time, the military is more reasonable than the government and the IDF’s spokesman invited the filmmakers to screen it for the military. A detailed military response to the evidence presented in NAZA would provide an essential counterweight.
The central dispute also reaches beyond whether Israel used artificial intelligence. The IDF says decisions to select and approve strikes are made by human personnel. The more consequential question is what information those people received and what weight they gave to civilian lives when making those decisions. If a system identified a Hamas operative inside a residential building, what level of civilian harm was considered acceptable in order to kill him? To what degree was AI part of the decision-making process?
Amid a global uproar over fears of AI, and in particular systems operating independently in ways that harm humans, this film catapults such questions to a very high place in the global discourse.
The AI questions lead to others. Did the permissible number of civilian casualties change according to the importance of the target? How confident did intelligence officers have to be that the intended person was actually present? What happened when information indicated that children or other family members were inside? How frequently did commanders cancel strikes because the expected civilian toll had become too high?
NAZA offers disturbing answers, and its central concern is ultimately a human one: what values and tolerances were built into the targeting process, and how were they applied by the people responsible for approving strikes?
Israel, this time around, has provided only a limited public account of those calculations during the war. Officials have emphasized the extraordinary difficulties of fighting Hamas in densely populated Gaza, the organization’s use of civilian areas for military purposes and Israeli estimates of a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio that they say compares favorably with other episodes of urban warfare, including Mosul. The precise civilian death toll in Gaza also remains contested, particularly the division between civilians and combatants.
There is no doubt in my mind – none whatsoever – that Hamas is the embodiment of evil. It is obvious to anyone paying attention that the jihadist group engineered the entire war to maximize casualties on its own side in order to make Israel an international pariah. But it is also rather obvious by Israel’s conduct in the war and the tens of thousands of civilians who have died, that Israel to walked into the trap laid by Hamas.
Aggregate ratios tell only part of the story. They reveal little about why a particular building was struck, how many civilians were expected to be inside, what military advantage commanders anticipated or how that anticipated advantage was weighed against the likely human cost. Repeated incidents involving substantial civilian casualties have often been followed by broad explanations rather than detailed accounts of the decision-making that produced them. Foreign journalists, of course, have not been freely allowed in.
That is where my memory from more than 20 years ago feels especially relevant. The military that sent an officer to my office understood the value of a transparent process. It understood that credibility depended partly on demonstrating, in specific cases, that civilian lives carried meaningful weight in operational decisions. During the Gaza war, amid extraordinary civilian loss of life, that instinct has been far less visible, to say the least.
Why did Israel act this way? Part of it has to do with the unspeakable trauma of the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion and massacre, which left Israelis in no mood for explanations, and placed its government in a defensive posture. Part of it is the nature of that government – an ultranationalist assemblage of highly illiberal and astoundingly cynical politicians. And part of it is the global demonization targeting Israel – so thorough and unfair that it almost explains the surrender of any serious effort at PR.
None of this was smart. The resulting information vacuum has given NAZA much of its power. A documentary built substantially around anonymous testimony carries an obvious credibility burden, particularly when its allegations concern classified practices that outsiders have little ability to examine independently. Yet Israel’s sparse public accounting of its targeting decisions has left relatively little detailed evidence against which those accounts can be measured. The filmmakers have supplied one version of what happened inside the targeting system; a detailed Israeli account could provide another.
Demonizing a couple of filmmakers based on the idea that they meant to do Israel harm will not convince intelligent people and will deepen Israel’s isolation. Israel needs to explain to its own people how it failed so utterly to protect the massacre of Jews. It needs to explain to the world what went on in Gaza. In fact, it needs to explain that to its own people as well.
All of that will await another government. This will not come from Netanyahu.
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