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NYC public schools don’t have the final two days of Passover off next year. A petition is trying to change that.
(New York Jewish Week) – New York City educators and parents are protesting after the city announced that public schools would be open for part of Passover next year, breaking from a longstanding tradition.
The eight-day holiday has overlapped virtually every year with the city’s spring break since 1973, when Jewish teachers successfully lobbied to guarantee the alignment.
But next year, Easter and Passover are separated by three weeks, making it impossible for the city’s weeklong school recess to overlap with both of them. The school-year calendar released last Friday revealed that the NYC Department of Education had scheduled the final two days of the holiday, April 29 and 30, as school days.
Because those days are Jewish holidays, when certain activities are prohibited according to Jewish law, observant educators and students would not be able to attend. The departure from tradition has put those people in a difficult situation, in part because educators have limited flexibility to take days off under their union contract.
“I’m religious and I am required by my religion to take those days off, regardless of whether we have school or not,” Yocheved Diskind, an occupational therapist at a public school in West Harlem, told the New York Jewish Week. “So now I have to take two extra days off and I don’t get paid at all for them.”
Diskind is one of around 1,500 people to have signed a petition calling on the city to extend the spring recess to include the Passover holidays.
“At a time when the values of inclusion are under attack, respecting the full observance of the Passover holiday should not be dependent on its proximity to Easter on the calendar,” says the petition, whose first signatories are from the occupational and physical therapists’ chapter of the United Federation of Teachers.
The pushback comes at a moment when the structure of the school year is being contested on several fronts. In a bid for inclusion, the education department has recently added holidays from multiple traditions to the school calendar — including the Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha; the Chinese Lunar New Year; Juneteenth and, potentially in the future, the Hindu festival of Diwali. Depending on how each holiday falls, the new days off can put pressure on the city to meet a 180-day minimum set by state law.
At the same time, the city education department and its teachers union negotiate annually over when teachers must work, and the city’s goal is to maximize the time that teachers are required to be in the classroom. Next year’s school calendar includes 185 required workdays for educators, including 182 instructional days, leaving some in the union concerned that members are being exploited.
“They used to build in an extra two or three days: In case they had to cancel for snow days, they would still reach 180 days. But since the pandemic, snow days are all remote days,” Diskind said. “So there’s no reason to build in even an extra two days into the calendar without extra compensation.”
The city, meanwhile, says it negotiated the new calendar with the union and that the holidays that are required contractually to be days off are. About the end of Passover, Nathaniel Steyer, the DOE press secretary, told the New York Jewish Week that the union “never ever brought this up” in negotiations about the calendar.
The UFT did not respond to repeated requests for comment by press time.
“There is no precedent for giving all days of Passover with a split,” Styer said in a statement. “There has been a split three times in recent memory — with the last night falling on the weekend. It is in our labor agreements that only the first two days of Passover and Good Friday are covered. Spring Recess is not in our labor contracts, but we generally attempt to cover most of Passover & Easter, when they are aligned on the calendar.”
New York City is among the rare school districts where Jewish holidays have been baked into the school-year calendar. For decades, the city had so many Jewish teachers and students that having classes on major Jewish holidays was a fool’s errand. The 1973 agreement around Passover came as the number of Jewish students and teachers was dwindling.
Now, the district has relatively few observant Jewish students; Orthodox schoolchildren in the city almost all attend private schools. But there are significant numbers of Orthodox education department employees, including in support services such as speech and occupational therapy. (The petition notes that students who attend school on Passover might have to do so without the support of these providers.) And the expectation not to have school on major Jewish holidays has largely survived, at times resulting in quirky calendars, such as a five-day gap between the first and second days of school in 2010.
The school calendar departed from the 1973 Passover agreement only once, in 1986, according to the petition. That year, Passover and Easter were not close in time, and adding two additional days off would have taken the district below the state requirement. Teachers then were given blanket approval to take the days as personal days, the petition says.
Diskind, the occupational therapist in West Harlem, explained that teachers could take the two days of Passover as personal days next year but would be left with only one discretionary day for the rest of the school year. They could also take time off without pay, an option that some Jewish educators exercise when other Jewish holidays fall on school days, but doing so has financial repercussions. (During the next school year, the fall Jewish holidays all land on weekends except for Yom Kippur, when schools are closed. Shavuot, the two-day spring festival, falls midweek in June.)
“Most people choose to take an unpaid day off because you generally need to use personal days for other reasons that would not be excused throughout the year,” Diskind said. “In the long term, unpaid days also require you to stay longer in order to reach your pension.”
Districts around the country have contended with how to accommodate religious observances — and not everyone believes the solution is ever to close schools at all.
David Bloomfield, an education professor who was a parent leader in New York City when his own children attended its public schools, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2020 that he thought districts should ramp up their protections for students and teachers who miss school for religious reasons instead of trying to adjust the calendar to please everyone.
“With the growth and sensitivity toward diversity, it’s one thing for a hermetic community to observe its traditions,” Bloomfield said. “But as we become more diverse, we have a harder time accommodating all of those important ceremonial obligations.”
“New York City is home to a diverse population, including 1.6 million Jews. People who celebrate Passover are a part of the rich fabric of our city,” says the petition. “The Passover holiday should not be an arena for givebacks and increased instructional days without compensation.”
“The proposed DOE calendar is especially disturbing in light of the increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks in recent years, particularly in New York City,” it also noted.
The number of anti-Jewish hate crimes in the first five months of the year was 100, according to data released this week by the New York Police Department, showing a 25% decline from 135 during the same period last year. Jews accounted for the victims of half of all hate crimes in the city last year and remain the most-targeted group, according to the police data; two men recently pleaded guilty to hate crimes related to a high-profile 2021 attack on a Jewish man who was beaten while walking to a pro-Israel rally.
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On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee
Following Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win of the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the state’s Jewish Democrats are reflecting on whether the divisions El-Sayed’s candidacy brought to the fore can be bridged before November.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race, with Jews both in fierce opposition and fiery support of El-Sayed in an election that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin, who had endorsed El-Sayed, believes Democrats will get behind the nominee in the interest of defeating Republican Mike Rogers — a race that could determine which party controls the Senate. Pre-primary polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
“Shame on any Jewish Democrat if they’re going to go vote for Mike Rogers and put our democracy at risk because they can’t find their way to supporting Abdul El-Sayed, who is such a brilliant person, just because he doesn’t share their exact beliefs on Israel and Palestine,” Levin told the Forward. “That’s ridiculous.”
Levin lost his Senate seat to Rep. Haley Stevens after heavy spending against him by AIPAC, the campaign fundraising group advocating for unrestricted U.S. aid to Israel. An AIPAC-associated super PAC spent some $32 million in a failed attempt to get Stevens the Senate nomination.
Stevens endorsed El-Sayed for the general election Wednesday morning. But some Jews who voted for Stevens see no possibility for reconciliation. Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the modern Orthodox synagogue Kehillat Etz Chayim in suburban Detroit had endorsed Stevens in the primary, alarmed by El-Sayed’s association with the controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and condemnation of Israel as a genocidal and apartheid state.
In a TV interview Wednesday, El-Sayed used the term “bloodthirsty” to describe Israel.
“To have so many people vote for someone who is so hurtful to the Jewish community, the things that the Jewish community values — I think it’s depressing,” Lopatin told the Forward.
Lopatin has made up his mind that he will not vote for El-Sayed in the general election, but he also isn’t yet sold on Rogers, the Republican nominee.
“I have to study him more,” Lopatin said. “But I will not vote for Abdul El-Sayed, definitely, and I would tell people they should not.”
Lopatin said he wishes Stevens would condemn El-Sayed rather than endorse him.
Still, others see El-Sayed as the best candidate to face Rogers in the general — and don’t want him to pull back on the issues that won him the nomination. Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a photographer outside Detroit who helped organize the group Jews for Abdul, said she has confidence El-Sayed will win the general — attributing the close primary race partly to the influence of outside money supporting Stevens.
“He was able to win this election in the face of close to $70 million of outside funding going to bolster his opponent,” Weinberg Barefield said. “This election is showing us, and elections around the country are showing us, that elections are not to be bought — they’re to be earned.”
Roslyn Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, was also among El-Sayed’s Jewish supporters, even as she disagreed with him on his lack of support for a two-state solution. She stressed the importance of beating Rogers in November irrespective of disagreements on Israel.
“My motto is and will be: vote blue, no matter who,” Schindler told the Forward. “I am hoping that all Democrats realize that to do otherwise will be self-destructive and just plain wrong.”
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens in the primary — isn’t issuing an endorsement in the general election yet.
She said the close margin El-Sayed won by, about 15,000 votes, gives her hope that El-Sayed will see the need to unify his party. A start, she said, would be focusing less on AIPAC during his general election campaign.
“There’s a lot of opportunity on Abdul’s side to be a better bridge maker versus kind of a bridge burner,” Alexander told the Forward. “The cards are his. It’s his responsibility to initiate.”
In his election night speech, El-Sayed didn’t mention AIPAC by name, instead speaking more generally about getting money out of politics.
On Wednesday, he addressed Jewish Michiganders directly: “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
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‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem)
One thing about the late Forverts staff writer and critic Miriam Hoffman — she cooked a heavenly eggplant in tomato sauce.
And why do I know this about one of our writers? Hoffman, a veritable lexicon-caldron of Yiddish sayings and terms she’d archived from her own mother’s distinct poylish dialect, was many things: A distinguished long-term professor of Yiddish at Columbia University; a theater critic turned playwright who turned the New York Public Theatre’s founding director Joseph Papp into a serious supporter of Yiddish culture; a child survivor of Siberian exile, and so much more.
As she encountered immigrant American life in da Bronx, the tiny dynamo that was Hoffman delighted in becoming American, freely advising everyone on the best consumer goods this country had to offer. A country that was a home and refuge to her, her parents, her husband and so many in her vast circle of Yiddishist friends, students, fellow writers, educators and chosen family. And then, once upon a time, she welcomed me into her Florida home for an overnight stay, so that I could record her jaw-dropping tales of how she and her beloved mameloshn Yiddish both survived the khurbn, the Holocaust. And talk into the video camera she did.
But first, there was lunch.
Rest in all your ferocious deliciousness, Miriam Hoffman, and thank you. For the eggplant, the advice on the best toothpaste, the stories — and for doing everything, everything, everything possible, to transmit your Yiddish to another generation.
The Yiddish Teacher
The Yiddish teacher bending saying:
In my book you’ll learn
the alefbeys through pictograms like so:
The gimel is a camel
The beys a house
You see?
The Yiddish teacher has an archive
in her bedroom closet
The folding doors open revealing:
shoeboxes filled with
stories and
poems and
songs she
wrote as a child
in the displaced persons camp
on paper donated to Jewish refugees
The Yiddish teacher was once
seated in back
of a transport truck
with all the other refugees
Trying to go over the Swiss Alps
to Mandate Palestine
The Yiddish teacher was born
in a Siberian prison camp
“people were starving, sure,
but there was sex”
The Yiddish teacher was the only
woman writer on staff
at the Forverts Yiddish newspaper
The Yiddish teacher remembers
the first time her family ate
Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and
meatballs
from a can
in the Bronx
We go shopping together
The Yiddish teacher loves Rao’s tomato sauce
“it’s the best”
The Yiddish teacher recommends
“Mavis Toothpaste”
It’s the best
The Yiddish teacher loves to
go fly fishing
The Yiddish teacher is short and slim
and round
I think
if I cup my hands together
I can
carry her around always
— Chana Pollack
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Christopher Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ is a Talmud-quoting, Tisha B’Av epic
“Before there were Jews… there was ‘The Odyssey,’” a theater manager infamously posted on a marquee in Portland, Oregon.
While the mythic, Bronze Age events recounted in the blockbuster film likely never transpired, Homer’s epic poem is by any measure younger than the Jewish people. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, now a proxy for a pitched battle over the essence of Western civilization, could not exist as it is without the Jews. Indeed, whether it knows it or not, it is telling a foundational story of our history.
Much of the criticism surrounding the film, which managed to agitate classicists from its first set photos of Matt Damon in a crested Grecian helmet (not a period-accurate Mycenaean boar-tusk ensemble) and bigots of all stripes with its casting of a trans man and people of color, has shifted since its release just before Tisha B’Av, taking aim at the film’s ideas and how they may clash with those of antiquity’s.
“Did you Christianize The Odyssey?” podcaster Zhong Shu asked Nolan in a now-viral interview.
Nolan explained that he was drawn to the ancient ethic of “xenia,” called “Zeus’ Law” in the film. In the Greek conception, this means welcoming guests because you never know if they may be a God. In Nolan’s blockbuster it’s described as treating others how you would be treated. When the law is breached, society as we know it comes undone, leading to our hero’s atonement and qualms that seem at odds with his traditional characterization.
While Nolan’s understanding mirrors the Christian Golden Rule, which itself is antedated by statements in the Torah and by Hillel, his vision of civilizational ruin when it is trespassed is more central to Judaism. Odysseus laments that, by creating the Trojan horse, and exploiting the code of hospitality to launch a massacre, he has broken something.
“To burn the walls of Troy is to burn the world entire,” Damon’s Odysseus tells Anne Hathaway’s Penelope. This is more or less a paraphrase from Talmudic wisdom: “To destroy one life is to destroy the world entire,” and its more recognizable corollary, “to save one life is to save the world entire.”
The Hebrew Bible is rife with examples of hospitality in extremis. In Sodom, Lot offers his daughters to a mob of rapists rather than have them violate his heavenly guests. The result: a destroyed city and a wife reduced to a table condiment. (Just before, Abraham fed these visitors, plus another angel of God.)
But watching the film Tuesday, I was reminded of another story. Remember when I mentioned Tisha B’Av, the holiday marking the destruction of Judaism’s ancient capital?
Our tradition teaches that the second temple fell because a man holding a banquet in Jerusalem kicked out his enemy, a fellow by the name of Bar Kamtza. Humiliated by his host, Bar Kamtza plots his revenge. He goes to Caesar and tells him the Jews are conspiring against his rule. To prove it, Bar Kamtza, like the wily Odysseus, concocts a ruse, suggesting the Romans send a sacrifice to the rabbis and see if they offer it.
They don’t, as Bar Kamtza blemishes the animal, making it unfit for offering.
In The Odyssey, the famous gift horse is presented as a tribute to Athena. Its blemish is the fighting force it hides inside, ready to sack the city.
The upshot of the rejected temple sacrifice was the razing of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans. The temple is desecrated, in much the way the temple of Athena is in the film.
Christian theology doesn’t argue quite so forcefully that the violation of the Golden Rule augurs a civilizational collapse. Quite the contrary today, where xenophobia and whispers of Great Replacement — akin to the trade-wind rumors of sea peoples in Nolan’s film — have taken root in the Evangelical right. (Ezra Klein, and really anyone attuned to commentary as subtle as IMAX subwoofers, picked up on this tension.)
Jewish history tells us we fare poorly in places where the stranger isn’t welcome.
In a departure from the text, Nolan ends Odysseus’ wandering with his voluntary exile. He sails west, predicting a benighted age to come, where his exploits will be sung as men lose the ability to write.
Our story ends on a similarly bleak, yet hopeful note.
When Jerusalem fell, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai devised his own deception, sneaking past the city walls in a casket (before he was let out, zealots wanted to stab the bier, recalling the Trojans’ stabbing of the horse).
But before Yohanan can make his escape he’s intercepted by the general Vespasian, who he mistakenly refers to as the emperor. Vespasian offers a correction, but almost instantly a messenger confirms this designation, telling him Caesar died and named him his successor. Regarding Yohanan’s mistake as prophecy, he offers him a request.
Jerusalem had fallen, self-determination was unrealistic, and so Yohannan asks for the city of Yavneh and its sages. From there our modern history began, literacy thrived and a dark age was subdued.
The Temple and Troy have yet to be rebuilt, but their legends live on.
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