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In Denver, a Jewish day school happily copes with a surge in new students
(JTA) — This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives. Author Drew Kaplan is a student at Denver Jewish Day School.
Denver Jewish Day School’s principal never thought he would spend so much time looking at school furniture catalogs.
Jeremy Golubcow-Teglasi needed to turn a former workspace into a classroom for a middle school math class and occasional Hebrew classes. Between this and needing to increase the capacity in a few other rooms, he was in the market for new desks, chairs, and tables to serve the 37 new students who have joined DJDS over the past two years.
Enrollment in DJDS’ upper division, which is middle and high school, is 19% higher than it was two years ago.
“Space has suddenly become a real constraint,” said Golubcow-Teglasi, who leads the upper school. “When you put 70 more people in a building that normally houses 120, you have to get creative about space.” Currently, the upper division has 189 students, an all-time high.
He and others describe the growth as a reflection of the rise in antisemitism and increase in Jewish identity following the war in Israel, causing many families to seek a larger Jewish community for their children. As a result, enrollment in Jewish schools like DJDS has increased since Oct. 7, following a similar nationwide trend. Now Jewish schools across the country are having to suddenly adapt to surges in enrollment, causing schools like DJDS—where this reporter has been a student for the past 12 years—to hire more teachers, buy more furniture, and adapt their class offerings.
Across the country, more than half of surveyed U.S. schools have seen an increase in students or families considering enrollment since Oct. 7, according to Prizmah, a network of Jewish day schools and yeshivas.
Additionally, 60% of the 72 schools it surveyed last school year, “identified new students who enrolled in Jewish day schools this school year as a result of the change in climate post Oct. 7,” according to a “Trends Update” released in February.
Donna Klein High School in Palm Beach County, Florida, saw an increase of 177 students the year following Oct. 7. Of those students, 35 families said they made the switch due to antisemitism or anti-Zionism.
Similar to Donna Klein, 80% of families joined DJDS since the 2023-24 school year, citing Jewish Identity & Environment as influencing their decision to transfer. Additionally 67% cited school-wide community as a reason, 61% cited Physical Safety, and 53% cited social-emotional safety. These same reasons, according to Golubcow-Teglasi, also contributed to the higher retention rates seen at DJDS.
Few families cited antisemitism explicitly as a factor for transferring to DJDS, according to Golubcow-Teglasi, who said it was sometimes mentioned as a factor, but he was never entirely sold that Oct. 7 alone is driving DJDS’s enrollment growth. “But I think it’s a reasonable hypothesis.”
Enrollment has increased in two distinct “surges,” Golubcow-Teglasi said. The first was after the Covid-19 pandemic, and the subsequent school year, when families were drawn to a small, largely in-person school. But that accelerated pattern of enrollment flattened out until the second “surge” hit following the Oct. 7 attacks.
The school year after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, 21 new students joined the Upper Division. Annabelle Dennis and Hailey Lutz were among the new transfers.
Dennis, a junior, transferred from a private Catholic school. “I really wanted a smaller school and community,” she said, “the kids were questionable — really just antisemitic.”
Dennis struggled as many students came up to her and made hateful comments. “People have asked me why I don’t have horns, and people have told me I killed their Lord and Savior, and they can never forgive me,” she said.
The school’s administration “could have done a better job,” Dennis said. She said that regarding most cases of antisemitism, the administration looked the other way, “sometimes it was handled, but most of the time, they did not handle anything.”
Lutz, a senior at DJDS, transferred the school year after Oct. 7 because she was tired of her schoolmates constantly bringing up the situation in Israel and Gaza. As one of the only Jews at her school, she looked to transfer to a school where she could be herself.
Students at her school “had a lot of questions on what was going on, especially with all the misinformation being spread on social media,” she said. “People weren’t necessarily antisemitic or anti-Jewish, but they were asking questions. She said she felt as if classmates were trying to get her to say that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza or agree with other assertions that Lutz described as “propaganda or misinformation.”
Holden Demain spent his first semester of 11th grade away from DJDS, the school he’s attended since Kindergarten, attending school in Washington, D.C. as part of the U.S. Senate Page Program.
After returning to DJDS in the middle of the 2024-2025 school year, Demain noticed the changes at the school.
“The hallways are damn crowded, which is great,” Demain said. “There is so much more opportunity to create different kinds of clubs.”
Demain leads one such club, Zemirot, where students sing traditional Jewish songs. This year at DJDS, there is also a new baking club, a Hacky Sack club, and a financial literacy club.
Similar to Golubcow-Teglasi, Demain does not fully attribute the surge in enrollment to Oct. 7; he also credits the population growth in Denver and students switching from other Jewish schools in the area.
“I think it’s been really good. There are a bunch of new opportunities, like you can make new friends that you never would have met before,” said Kaitlin Schatz, a junior entering her fifth year at DJDS. Schatz explains how it has been fun to see new students with different backgrounds.
But at the same time, more students being in the building means that there are space constraints. “We do not have enough gym space,” Golubcow-Teglasi said, to allow both high schoolers and middle schoolers to use the gym during lunch. There has been so much demand for the Advanced Placement United States History class this year that it is being offered in two different periods, whereas before it ran every other year. Last year, AP European History was also offered in two different periods for the first time.
Jerry Rotenberg, an upper-division Judaics teacher and student council advisor, said that teacher workload has definitely increased. “There’s more work to do — more tests and assignments to grade, and preparations take longer,” Rotenberg noted that it isn’t necessarily an added stress, just more on his plate.
Meanwhile, during particularly busy periods, some classes meet in the hallways.
“It’s probably the worst place to have a class,” said Hannah Gruenwald, a senior who is taking her yearbook editor class in the DJDS lobby. It makes sense that the two-student class would be put in this situation, Gruenwald says, “but it isn’t conducive to learning. Having a table would be nice.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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