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Looming Jewish teacher shortage prompts new accelerated training in well-known Jerusalem program
When Rabbi David Wallach was looking for an institution to help him become a better Jewish day school teacher, he was frustrated to find that most of the places he researched offered either training in Jewish studies or general teacher training. It was hard to find both.
Then he discovered the Pardes Teacher Fellowship in Jerusalem, where he ended up getting his master’s degree in Jewish education.
“Pardes is the only place that integrated for me both the Jewish studies and the pedagogy,” said Wallach, now 32 and a teacher and assistant director of Jewish studies at Les Ecoles Azrieli Herzliah High School in Montreal, Canada. “It wasn’t that you learn Judaism in one place and learn education in another. This entire program is about the pedagogy of Jewish learning. That approach is unique, powerful and invaluable for me.”
More than 270 Jewish teachers and educators-in-training from North America have gone through the Pardes Teacher Fellowship, a two-year master’s program that offers participants intensive Jewish learning, Jewish educational pedagogy, practical student-teacher training and mentoring in North American day schools.
A mainstay for over two decades, the well-known fellowship is being redesigned for next year to make some key changes that administrators believe will better serve the future teachers of Jewish day schools: Instead of requiring two years in Israel with monthlong student-teaching stints along the way, Pardes is offering an accelerated program that requires just one year of intense study in Jerusalem followed by a second year of teacher training in schools in North America.
The program is funded, so students’ expenses are minimized and they receive a stipend, and at the program’s conclusion they obtain their master’s degree. Pardes is currently accepting applications for the fall.
“This is a unique opportunity to study pedagogy with spectacular teachers in Jewish education,” said Aviva Lauer, director of the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators.
There’s another reason for the changes at Pardes: a looming crisis in Jewish education to which the Jewish world hasn’t fully woken up, according to some educational leaders.
“The crisis that we knew was coming is here. Jewish day schools, early childhood centers and part-time congregational schools across the country face a shortage of educators to fill multiple openings for lead teachers, assistants and substitutes,” wrote the authors of a recent piece in the online publication eJewish Philanthropy published by leaders from the Association of Directors of Communal Agencies for Jewish Education. “This is no longer simply a ‘challenge.’ Rather, it is a crisis because of continuing trends in the overall job market, exacerbated by the pandemic.”
The shortage is related in part to low salaries in the profession. A recent report by the Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education showed that fewer new teachers are entering education and more current teachers are leaving. As a result, many Jewish schools are hiring staff without appropriate training.
“We are looking for teacher candidates who love Jewish text, Jewish living, and Jewish tradition, recognize that the children are our future, and want to serve their communities as role models for the next generation,” said Rabbi Avi Spodek, director of recruitment at the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators.
Rabbi Jordan Soffer, head of school at the Striar Hebrew Academy in Sharon, Massachusetts, used his training in the Pardes Teacher Fellowship to enhance his classroom teaching. (Courtesy of Pardes)
Pardes’ revamped fellowship program tightens its format with a more modular structure that offers more credit for the pedagogy courses students take in Israel and credit for some courses online. The purpose of the change is to enhance the practical training and enable those who can only get away to Israel for a single academic year (plus two summers) to participate.
“The new format is a soft easing-in to teaching,” Lauer said, giving students time to immerse themselves in a school before becoming full-time teachers.
The principle that guides the Pardes approach is subject-specific pedagogy, according to Lauer: “Not just how to be a teacher but how to be a Jewish studies teacher. It’s learning how to integrate and balance textual content with what we call ‘meaning-mining.’ It’s about introducing our students to varied lenses through which they might teach Jewish texts, and helping them explore what will be important and meaningful to them to teach their future students.”
The Pardes program boasts a star-studded staff, including Yiscah Smith, Rabbi Meesh Hammer-Kossoy, Judy Klitsner, and Rabbi Zvi Hirschfield for Jewish studies, and Rachel Friedrichs, Reuven Margrett, Sefi Kraut, and Susan Yammer for the pedagogical components.
“The teachers are so special,” said Josh Less, a current fellow. “They are all unique in their own ways and have a great grasp of their subjects.”
Pardes attracts students from a diversity of Jewish denominational, cultural and professional backgrounds. The program’s alumni include six heads of school, five principals, 12 Jewish studies department chairs and six directors of Jewish life, among scores of Jewish teachers.
Less, 28, who recently completed a round of teacher training at the Milken School in Los Angeles, said the Pardes program has given him critical classroom experience and essential Jewish study skills that he learned in Pardes’ beit midrash, or Jewish study hall. He plans to become a full-time day school teacher but first wants to get his rabbinical ordination.
“My advice to someone thinking about this program is: Definitely do it!” Less said. “The program is such a blessing for the right person who wants to do intense learning and teaching. It’s intense but indispensable.”
Wallach said the most valuable thing he took away from the Pardes program was how to connect learning to practice. When he teaches about Passover, for example, Wallach turns his classroom walls into an art gallery, hanging dozens of images of the Seder’s four children drawn from different haggadahs and asking his students to explain which images speak to them. That gets them talking. Once they’re done analyzing, he asks the students to create their own images of the four children.
“This kind of exercise always gets them. They are intrigued by it. They are involved,” said Wallach, who has been teaching for seven years. He credits Pardes with showing him this kind of approach to learning.
“It wasn’t just: Here’s how to teach, in theory. It was about how to teach this specific Jewish studies text, the pedagogy of it,” he recalled. “We practiced it, and we had a chance to actually live it, both with our peer training and the teaching.”
Wallach added, “All the best teachers I know went through Pardes.”
Having excellent teachers is critical for the future of the Jewish people, Lauer said.
“Our goal is to give our fellows outstanding training – for their own sake, for the sake of the schools that will hire them, for the sake of the children and for the sake of the future of the Jewish people,” she said. “People who graduate from our program are avidly sought-after and seen as stars in the field. We are hoping to find the new stars. The Jewish world needs new stars.”
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The post Looming Jewish teacher shortage prompts new accelerated training in well-known Jerusalem program appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Waiting on line on Christmas is a time-honored New York tradition — was it ever thus?
At 6 a.m., the morning before Christmas, Charles Licata was waiting outside the door of Russ & Daughters, two hours before the century-old Manhattan appetizing store opened. Each Christmas Eve for the past 42 years, Licata, jones this time by a family member and a friend, has made the hour-long drive from central New Jersey. “I like to be first in line,” he told me.
Licata, who manufactures granite countertops, told me he was hosting 40 for a traditional Italian feast of seven fishes on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day, his family had plans to devour another seven fishes and then some. “We got sable, lox, caviar, the spreads, pickled herring, tuna fish salad, hot and cold smoked salmon,” he started to list, before adding, “we got everything.”
Nikki Russ Federman, the fourth-generation owner of Russ & Daughters, instantly greeted Licata who she recognized from years past. By 9 a.m., she was hustling off to the shop’s Brooklyn bakery because they were already running out of bagels.
The Christmas Eve crowds rival Erev Yom Kippur and they grow throughout the day.
“Christmas is a Jewish holiday,” Russ Federman quipped.
For Licata, the line itself, with its banter and camaraderie is part of the ritual, except queuing at Russ & Daughters isn’t traditional. Lower East Side Jews didn’t wait in line; they jostled at deli counters and mobbed pushcarts.
“When I arrived on the scene in 1978 to take over the business,” third-generation owner Mark Russ Federman recounted in his 2013 book Russ & Daughters, “I discovered that there had never been a real attempt to implement a method to maintain crowd control and customer flow.”
First, the lox slicers behind the counter would pick out their regulars from the crowd, and then call “Who’s next?” To which, according to Mark Russ Federman, several elderly women would yell in their Yiddish-inflected English, “My next.” Mayhem would ensue.
“Grandpa Russ, my parents, and my uncles and aunts,” wrote Mark Russ Federman, “felt that having customers take a number from a machine and wait their turn was insulting, impersonal, and too ‘uptown.’”
It was during the Yom Kippur rush of 1978 that Russ Federman established a numbered ticketing system, turning the huddled mass of customers into an orderly line — something he saw as both more efficient for business and fairer for the customers. Since then, the appetizing store’s line has only grown, as have lines throughout the city.
Weathering the wait for Russ & Daughters seems more legit than camping out for the latest TikTok trend. Since the pandemic, lines in New York have become ubiquitous — for oversized pastries, for stunt croissants, for hype pizza. This past spring, a Saturday Night Live skit joked that a New Yorker’s favorite pastime is to “wait in a big dumb line.”
Waiting on line for West Village brunch often feels performative, but for Licata at Russ & Daughters, it isn’t about clout, it’s about continuity. It was a Jewish friend who first brought bagels and lox over for Christmas breakfast at Licata’s home decades ago. “I’m just carrying the tradition forward,” he said.
Down the block, most every year, Jeremy Kahn and his family make a pilgrimage from Washington, D.C. to Katz’s Deli. This past week, he was shocked to find that, even at the off-time of 4 p.m., the line still stretched to the corner. He speculated that there were more tourists. “I thought we’d be able to just walk right in,” he said.
After the 30 minute-plus wait at Katz’s, customers hungry for pastrami take a ticket at the door; they must sort into new lines to wait their turn with a cutter at the counter. And before leaving, customers must again wait their turn at the cashier’s line.
For Kahn, the wait is worth it. “This is where my grandfather would come to eat,” he said, and now he was taking his two young children and his father. “It means something that there is a line to get in. People are willing to wait in the cold.”
Katz’s with its shared cafeteria tables is known for its hustle and bustle, but things feel orderly compared to how it once was. In 1966, the iconic cheap eats guide, Underground Gourmet, deemed Katz’s “the largest, nosiest, busiest, and sloppiest delicatessen in Manhattan.” The guide’s authors, the illustrators and graphic designers Milton Glaser and Jerome Snyder, described ordering as a “struggle” that involved having to “muscle your way up to the endless serving counter and try to make yourself heard.”
Standing on line was foreign enough to Jewish immigrants that the Forverts mostly referred to queues, not by the Yiddish word “rey” (meaning row), but with the English “line,” spelled out in Hebrew letters. In 1930, the Forverts reported that boxing fans were waiting on long lines in the cold and rain to watch a Jackie Kid Berg lightweight championship bout at Madison Square Garden, but Jews at the time mostly seemed to be lining up at Depression-era soup kitchens and unemployment lines in the U.S. or, worse, for handouts at refugee centers in Europe.
It’s not just Jews who were late to line up; lines are actually a fairly modern phenomenon. Often cited as containing the first description of a queue in English is Thomas Carlyle’s 1837 book The French Revolution, which described Parisians lining up at bakers’ shops during a famine. By World War II, queuing had become commonplace in rationing-era Britain.
Lines were then associated with shortages and bureaucracy; now they represent wealth and leisure. There are still long waits at the DMV and over-burdened food pantries, but today, many lines are fueled by social media. A long line at a bakery signals that their $8.50 pistachio rose croissant is popular; joining the line gives you online bragging rights, not joining risks FOMO.
My friend Miriam Berger, a 91-year-old Manhattanite, says she has no memory of these types of lines in the 20th century. “I have no patience to stand on a line for anything,” she told me, “probably because such behavior didn’t exist in my growing-up environment.”
We still manage to do much without lines. We squeeze into rush hour subway cars, flag down bartenders at crowded pubs, and hail cabs. At times, it feels cut-throat, but there’s an unspoken etiquette — someone waves you into a lane, a stranger holds the door.
Lines promise efficiency and equity, but the first-come-first-serve system easily breaks down. There are cutters, professional line waiters, and ways to pay your way to the front of the line with priority passes and VIP options for most anything.
And very often, there are ways to avoid lines altogether. At the end of his book, Mark Russ Federman writes that when his daughter Nikki and his nephew Josh entered the business in 2001, they started online ordering. “This wasn’t the way the Russ family did business,” he initially thought before he accepted the idea. “If you wanted to buy our fish, you came to the store. If you wanted to place an order over the phone, we had to recognize your voice or know your family.”
Now, Russ & Daughters ships nationwide, and with delivery apps, lox and herring can be ferried almost instantly to your door on an electric moped.
That’s too uptown for my tastes. I’d rather take a number.
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The data is in: For many in the Northeast, Christmas isn’t Christmas without Chinese food
It’s not just a myth that Jews head to Chinese restaurants on Christmas. It’s science!
Sort of. A new report from the financial services company Coventry Direct claims to have quantified the trend. The report analyzed search data for “Chinese food near me” during the week of Christmas from 2020 to 2024, and found that the Northeast dominated the results.
The top five states included Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and New Hampshire, while New York, which is home to the largest Jewish population in the country, came in seventh place. Under the assumption that Jews are overrepresented in the Northeast, the study confirms that Coventry Direct is not peer-reviewed.
The study also analyzed Google search trends over the past year to find the top-searched Chinese food dish in each state. While Szechuan chicken was the most popular dish, taking first place in eight states, New York’s most searched item was Buddha’s Delight, a — IYKYK — vegetarian stew.
The Jewish Christmas tradition was famously referenced during Elena Kagan’s United States Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2010 when she was asked where she was on Christmas day:
“You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant,” replied Kagan.
In recent years around Christmas, social media has also been flooded with images of a sign where the seemingly fictional “Chinese Restaurant Association” of America thanks its Jewish diners for their patronage.
“The Chinese Restaurant Association of the United States would like to extend our thanks to the Jewish people,” the sign reads. “We do not completely understand your dietary customs … but we are proud and grateful that your GOD insist you eat our food on Christmas.”
Two men enjoy Chinese cuisine prepared by Chinese chefs within the guidelines of kosher food preparation at a restaurant. (Getty Images)
But the now-ubiquitous tradition of Jews eating Chinese food on Christmas traces back to the early 20th century, when Jewish immigrants began carving out distinctly American rituals of their own. If for no other reasons, Chinese restaurants were more likely to be open on Christmas.
A classic 1993 study on the tradition, “New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern,” by Gaye Tuchman and Harry Levine, traced the Jewish affinity for Chinese food to a few factors: Chinese restaurants at the time “welcomed everyone,” offered flavors familiar to an Eastern European Jewish palate and were considered a “sophisticated” dining experience for new-ish, Jewish Americans stepping outside their comfort zones.
While Chinese restaurants do not typically offer kosher fare, Tuchman and Levine also argued that Chinese restaurants were viewed as “safe treyf” because Chinese cuisine rarely mixes milk and meat and ingredients like pork and shrimp are chopped into hard-to-identify pieces.
To celebrate the longstanding tradition, a comedy club in New York’s East Village is set to host “Kosher Chinese: The Comedy Show,” with patrons enjoying kosher dumplings and an “unapologetically alternative holiday spirit we all secretly love.” In San Francisco, the 33rd Annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy show kicks off tonight, and runs through Friday, Dec. 26.
From Massachusetts to Ohio, Jewish delis have also planned their own Chinese-inspired menus to mark the tradition.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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StopAntisemitism names Tucker Carlson ‘Antisemite of the Year’ as 2024 winner Candace Owens ramps up anti-Jewish rhetoric
(JTA) — The activist group StopAntisemitism has awarded the conservative personality Tucker Carlson its ignominious honor of “Antisemite of the Year,” citing his frequent invocation of classic antisemitic stereotypes.
The announcement comes as Carlson sits at the center of controversy on the American right about whether extremists should be welcomed in the Republican Party. It also marks the second year in a row that StopAntisemitism has selected a right-wing figure for its accolade, after years of awarding the mantle to mostly left-wing figures.
“Carlson mainstreams antisemitism by platforming and praising Holocaust revisionists and Nazi apologists, while hiding behind irony and plausible deniability,” the group said in a statement. “By legitimizing extremist voices and weaponizing conspiratorial imagery at massive scale, he has helped drag antisemitic ideas back into the mainstream.”
A watchdog presence with more than 300,000 followers on X, StopAntisemitism regularly mobilizes against activists and social media posts. The group has faced criticism for what some perceive as an inordinate focus on Muslim personalities, pro-Palestinian actions and non-prominent individuals. Its defenders deny that, pointing out that StopAntisemitism also regularly spotlights neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers on the right.
Its finalists for Antisemite of the Year included pro-Palestinian celebrities Ms. Rachel, Cynthia Nixon and Marcia Cross; mixed-martial-arts athlete and Holocaust denier Bryce Mitchell; two personalities associated with left-wing network The Young Turks; and social media personalities on both the far left (Guy Christensen) and far right (Stew Peters).
Carlson received the accolade on Sunday night, at the end of a weekend in which he was a keynote speaker at the convention of Turning Point USA, the young-conservatives group founded by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated this fall. In its announcement, StopAntisemitism noted Carlson’s speech at Kirk’s memorial service, in which he described the murder of Jesus in a way that both his critics and fans interpreted as implying that Jews or Israelis had been behind Kirk’s assassination.
At the convention, the Jewish pundit Ben Shapiro continued his campaign against Carlson and Carlson declared himself to free of the anti-Jewish animus that he has long been criticized as propagating.
“Let me just affirm one final time. Not only am I not an antisemite — and I would say so if I was — I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason,” Carlson said in his speech. “Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I don’t have any donors. I’m not an antisemite because anti-semitism is immoral in my religion. It is immoral to hate people for how they were born.”
It was the same explanation that Vice President JD Vance offered earlier this month when he said in an NBC News interview that he believed antisemitism is wrong.
In his own speech to Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, Vance again refrained from criticizing extremists in the Republican Party, saying that he opposes “purity tests” for inclusion in the conservative movement. He also said he believed that antisemitism in the United States was being fueled by “a real backlash” against U.S. aid to Israel..
As the convention was underway, last year’s “Antisemite of the Year,” the right-wing streamer Candace Owens, embarked on a four-hour broadcast eviscerating Shapiro; amplifying antisemitic theories, including that Jews controlled the slave trade; and promoting a classic work of antisemitism by August Rohling, a German Catholic who believed in the blood libel and argued that the Talmud is a secret guide used by Jews for nefarious purposes. Rohling died in 1931.
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