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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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The post NYC public schools don’t have the final two days of Passover off next year. A petition is trying to change that. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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DOGE Staffers Used ChatGPT to Cut Holocaust History Grants During Counter-DEI Purges: Lawsuit
Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw onstage during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, US, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) relied on the ChatGPT large language model program when deciding to cut grants for Jewish-related history programs, including one focused on violence against women during the Holocaust, according to a new class-action lawsuit.
DOGE staffer Justin Fox is named as one of the defendants in the suit filed in US federal court on Friday by the Authors Guild, which alleges that he was the one who developed the method of using ChatGPT prompts to determine which grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) — also a defendant — to cut in the name of eliminating any programs related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Fox said in a deposition that he regarded any grant related to a minority group as qualifying as “DEI” and thus up for elimination. When asked about a grant he chose to cancel related to violence against women during the Holocaust, he responded, “It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture.” Fox added, “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
The Trump administration has made a point of targeting DEI programs, especially on university campuses, arguing they foster bigotry by replacing merit with identity-based preferences. Many Jewish groups have criticized DEI initiatives for often excluding Jews, ignoring antisemitism, or characterizing Jews as white “oppressors” rather than as a historically oppressed minority group.
The lawsuit alleges that Fox and his fellow DOGE staffer Nathan Cavanaugh “made and executed the termination decision without any legal authority conferred by Congress. There is no jurisdictional barrier to vacating these unlawful terminations, and permanent relief is warranted.”
One of the projects targeted by DOGE was a translation project titled In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers From the Soviet Union, which the lawsuit describes as “a critical, annotated translation into English of Yiddish and Russian works written in the aftermath of the most significant Jewish tragedy of the 20th century.”
ChatGPT put the book on the chopping block, stating that “this anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR.”
According to the suit, the DOGE cuts “are unconstitutional several times over. The record establishes, without genuine factual dispute, that the terminations violated the First Amendment by targeting grants for their viewpoints and perceived political associations; that they violated the equal protection guarantee by classifying grants based on race, sex, and other constitutionally protected characteristics.”
DOGE also allegedly targeted Catholic efforts to promote Holocaust studies. The suit notes that another grant Fox and Cavanaugh chopped was support for the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University.
In a deposition, NEH’s acting chair Michael McDonald said he did not know DOGE had relied on ChatGPT and rejected including Holocaust-related grants under DEI. He also claimed DOGE ignored his disagreements. DOGE possessed the final say about which projects to cut.
In response to the question “In your view, does this grant relate to DEI?” McDonald answered “no.” When the lawyer followed up with “would you consider this to be wasteful spend?” he replied “I would not, no.”
Since the NEH’s founding in 1965, the agency has provided over $6 billion in grants to fund over 70,000 projects in all 50 states.
The lawsuit details that Fox and Cavanaugh lacked “any relevant background in the humanities, public or private grant administration, peer review, or government service of any kind prior to joining the administration.”
According to the filing, the two DOGE staffers met with McDonald and Assistant Chair for Programs Adam Wolfson on March 12. However, Fox and Cavanaugh “entirely controlled the process of selecting grants to terminate and executing the terminations — their approach was top-down, viewpoint- and race-based, and indifferent to the views of NEH leadership or the ordinary processes of grant administration.”
DOGE’s mastermind, billionaire Elon Musk, has a professional rivalry with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
Musk faced multiple controversies last year involving alleged antisemitism, Nazis, and the Holocaust. Following his decision to make a gesture at a Jan. 20 rally which many interpreted as resembling a “Sieg Heil”-style salute, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) initially defended the billionaire before criticizing his choice to promote Holocaust humor on his X social media platform.
“We’ve said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it. Elon Musk, the Holocaust is not a joke,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO and National Director, wrote on X in response to Musk.
Musk faced criticism days later when addressing a gathering of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, where he said, “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” Critics decried the comments, arguing they minimized or dismissed the Holocaust.
“The remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, said in response to Musk on X. He warned that not focusing on learning lessons from the past is “an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.”
In July, following an upgrade to Musk’s ChatGPT rival Grok, the program began promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and in one instance labeled itself “MechaHitler.”
Two months later, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) released a report revealing the rise of antisemitism on X.
The report utilized OpenAI’s since-discontinued GPT-4o model and drew on a year-long investigation to find that “679,000 posts sampled violate X’s policies on antisemitism, and posts identified as antisemitic got 193 million views in the 11 months of this report, despite X’s promises to limit their visibility. Also, antisemitic conspiracies appear to perform disproportionately well on X, constituting 59% of posts in the sample but 73% of likes.”
The report noted that X had allowed for the rise of so-called “antisemitic influencers” and that “approximately one third of all likes on antisemitic posts were on posts shared by just 10 antisemitism ‘influencers.’ 9 out of these 10 ‘antisemitism influencers’ have more followers on X than any other platform, and 6 out of the 10 are verified on X. 3 out of the 10 profit from paid subscriptions on X.”
Amid the criticism, Musk has denied accusations of antisemitism and said his priority is to make X a bastion of free speech. He visited Israel in late 2023, weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of the Jewish state, and Auschwitz in January 2024. Following the latter trip, Musk said he was “frankly naive” about antisemitism and described himself as “Jewish by association.”
The Tesla CEO and X owner vowed to wear around his neck a dog tag reading “Bring Them Home” that was given to him by a parent of one of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza until all the captives were returned home.
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Trump’s Iran dithering puts Israel in an unprecedented position
Israel today finds itself in an unusual strategic position: It’s fighting a war that could last for weeks — or end almost instantly. And someone else will decide which way things go.
Down one path lies a prolonged campaign against Iran, with the possibility of regime change. Israel’s leaders openly hope that the campaign will enable the Iranian people to overthrow their rulers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently put it bluntly: “Our aspiration is to enable the Iranian people to cast off the yoke of tyranny.”
Down the other is a rapid cessation of the conflict, with incomplete results. President Donald Trump has already suggested that the conflict may be nearing completion. In a Monday interview with CBS News, Trump said bluntly: “The war is very complete, pretty much.”
Yet in the very same news cycle, Trump offered a strikingly different message. When asked whether the war was essentially over or just beginning, he replied: “I think you could say both.” He suggested he was considering the possibility of taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical global oil chokepoint, and warned on social media that if Iran interfered with shipping there, the United States would strike it “20 times harder than they have been hit thus far.”
Those contradictory statements capture the extraordinary ambiguity surrounding the conflict. And that ambiguity has left Israel in a profoundly complicated position. Now, it must be prepared simultaneously for two radically different scenarios: a prolonged war whose outcome could reshape the Middle East, or a sudden declaration that the conflict is over.
A successful start, and mixed outlook
So far, Israeli and American forces have struck deep inside Iran, decapitating the regime and crippling major parts of military infrastructure. Iran has retaliated with missile and drone attacks against Israel, most of which have been intercepted by Israel’s air defenses, but some of which have brought tragedy.
In recent days, Tehran has picked a new supreme leader: Mojtaba Khamenei, a hardliner and the son of the longtime despot killed on the first day of the war.
If the conflict continues on this trajectory, the implications could be enormous. Sustained pressure on Iran could destabilize the regime. Even without that best-case scenario outcome, a prolonged campaign could dramatically weaken the Islamic Republic.
But a long war carries real dangers. Iran still possesses missiles capable of reaching Israel, and has been firing them daily. Israel’s multilayered defense system intercepts most of them, but not all. A cluster missile strike on Monday killed two; if the war continues, more deaths are likely to follow. And the longer the war lasts, the greater the statistical likelihood that one missile will slip through and cause a true catastrophe.
Even without a disaster, the cumulative strain on Israeli society is unmistakable. The acquisition of weapons and callup of reserve troops is further disrupting an economy that has been in various states of disruption since Oct. 7, 2023. It is also measured in the unquantifiable damage that the stress is causing pretty much every person in the country.
Many businesses are closed, and public life is minimal. Missile alerts — often in the middle of the night — repeatedly send millions of civilians into shelters (and, for a privileged minority, reinforced “safe rooms” in their home). Many offices are half empty. Parents struggle to work while caring for children who are afraid to leave the house.
With ordinary life on hold, a prolonged war could therefore become a grinding economic and psychological burden, even if Israel continues to win militarily.
Yet Israelis broadly support the war. A poll last week found that 93% of the populace backs the operation.
How will they respond if Trump abruptly pulls the plug?
War by whim
To a degree that is profoundly unusual in the history of democratic countries, the trajectory of the war depends largely on one person.
Trump has shown himself to be prone to making unilateral decisions with enormous consequences for the international order without undergoing any of the standard processes.
He launched sweeping tariff wars that upended decades of bipartisan policy on the benefits of relatively free trade. He revived the idea that the U.S. should acquire Greenland — and for weeks refused to rule out using force against Denmark, a NATO ally, to achieve that end. Earlier this year, American forces kidnapped Venezuela’s president, after which Trump openly stated that the U.S. needs “access” to the country’s oil resources.
Even the rhetoric surrounding the Iran campaign is sui generis. In recounting why American forces had sunk Iranian naval vessels rather than capturing them, he approvingly relayed that he was supposedly told by commanders that it was simply “more fun to sink them.”
If Trump decides he is done, and the Islamic Republic limps on, Israelis will be left with the frustrating sense of having missed a huge opportunity to fundamentally alter an unacceptable situation in which Iran is constantly scheming to cause harm.
Iran has been, essentially, a fly the size of an elephant buzzing in Israel’s ear. Yes, the war will be spun as victory either way — but if it ends tomorrow, it will end without achieving all it could. And the current state of affairs, in which Israel effectively has a green light from a U.S. president as indifferent to convention as Trump, may not return.
A reopened Lebanon front
One complication that could outlast either of these scenarios is Hezbollah. The Lebanon-based militia, a regional proxy for Iran, joined the fighting almost immediately, launching rockets and drones toward northern Israel. That intervention may give Israel a strategic opportunity to address a problem that has festered since post-Oct. 7 fighting ended on the Lebanon front in November, 2024.
When that conflict concluded, the Lebanese government pledged that it would dismantle and disarm Hezbollah, finally restoring the state’s monopoly on force. In practice, little changed. Hezbollah remained entrenched in parts of central Lebanon, albeit no longer along Israel’s border.
Israeli patience with this renewed status quo has steadily eroded. But the devastation of the Gaza war had badly damaged Israel’s international standing, making Jerusalem see a renewed Lebanon campaign as diplomatically difficult.
Now, the regional picture has shifted. Lebanese officials — including the country’s president — have increasingly signaled that Hezbollah’s continued militarization is unsustainable. Beirut has in recent days already taken steps to curb Iranian influence, including by restricting activity by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Senior figures have made clear that Hezbollah’s role as an armed “state within a state” cannot continue indefinitely.
Elements of Lebanon’s government clearly hope Israel might finish a task they cannot accomplish themselves — the decisive debilitation of Hezbollah — though preferably without bringing another devastating war onto Lebanese soil.
What this means: Israel is likely to be at war, in some way or another, for some time to come. Trump may call time on the war with Iran; he has no such power when it comes to Israel’s own border conflicts.
But the biggest challenges, and biggest changes, facing Israel belong with the Iran war, which has the potential to truly redefine the region. Netanyahu may wield some influence over Trump, but the decision rests with the White House.
This is an unprecedented state of affairs in Israel’s history: A perilous war of aggression, conducted without real Israeli control. The cost of this is whiplash, as the country has no choice but to live with both possibilities at once: a long war that could reshape the region — or a sudden declaration that the war has been won. Netanyahu may be able to influence Trump one way or the other — but he won’t make the call.
For Israelis, that is the rub in the hyper-alliance with Trump’s U.S. Next month, as Israel celebrates its 78th Independence Day, that independence will feel a tad fictitious. An extreme dependency lies bare for all to see, and it will outlive Trump. His successor may not be as munificent.
The post Trump’s Iran dithering puts Israel in an unprecedented position appeared first on The Forward.
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FIFA COO Says World Cup ‘Too Big’ to Be Postponed by Israel-Iran War
Soccer Football – FIFA Club World Cup – Group D – Esperance de Tunis v Chelsea – Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US – June 24, 2025, General view of the FIFA logo before the match. Photo: REUTERS/Lee Smith
FIFA Chief Operating Officer Heimo Schirgi said the 2026 World Cup is “too big” to postpone and will proceed as planned despite the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Schirgi made the comments while speaking on Monday outside construction of the International Broadcast Center, which is located inside the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and will serve as a hub for international coverage of the World Cup. Schirgi was asked about Iran as it remains unclear if the country will participate in World Cup, after the US and Israel launched joint airstrikes against the Islamic Republic that led to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other high-ranking Iranian officials. Iran has retaliated with strikes against Israel and civilian areas across the Middle East.
“At some stage, we will have a resolution, and the World Cup will go on, obviously,” Schirgi replied, according to NBC 5 in Dallas. “The World Cup is too big, and we hope that everyone can participate that has qualified.”
FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafstrom previously said the organization is closely monitoring the situation in the Middle East ahead of the World Cup in June. Schirgi added that FIFA has been in contact with Iran’s soccer federation, but did not provide details about what was discussed, according to Reuters.
The FIFA World Cup will take place across cities in the US, Mexico, and Canada from June 11 to July 19. Iran qualified for the tournament through its participation in the Asian Football Conference. It is set to compete in Group G at the World Cup and is scheduled to face New Zealand on June 15 and Belgium on June 21, both in Los Angeles, before going head-to-head against Egypt on June 26 in Seattle. Soccer fans from Iran are already barred from entering the United States for the World Cup as part of a travel ban that the Trump administration announced in June.