I guess a tenuous connection could be made between the two academies when you consider that the driving force to close the latter was a group headed by a notoriously obnoxious Zionist?I'm confused about what makes that a connection.
People's Exhibit A: Brooklyn's Hebrew Language Academy in Kings Highway (an neighborhood which is in many parts profoundly Jewish, though not particularly Orthodox). I visited founders of the HLA during the firestorm of controversy that surrounded its opening. Give 'em an inch and they'll be learning Gemara before you can say shalosh, cried the critics. Only Jewish parents want it, groused the Times. It'll be a yeshiva in public school's clothing, screamed the Post. (To be fair, HLA did end up in an old yeshiva building—but go ahead and ask me how many HeadStart preschool programs are also housed in old yeshivas in Marine Park, Kings Highway and Brighton Beach and nobody bats an eyelash—go ahead, ask me).Meanwhile, a similar school has been proposed for North Jersey.
1) Are they teaching religion? When a similar Hebrew charter school in Hollywood, FL was built in 2007, it fell into controversy for that reason.Is there any evidence that they are teaching religion?
2) Should a school being paid for with public funds restrict itself to "celebrating" one culture over others?Again, that's not an issue that is in any way specific to this school. I have friends who are angling wildly to get their kid into the New York French-American charter school, and I don't think there are any articles hand-wringing about that one.
3) Will these schools support ethnic diversity?The answer seems clearly to be yes.
Rabbi Siegel said the school was proceeding with such extreme caution that even a neutral mention of religion was unlikely. The sign outside Ben Gamla was going to include a Hebrew phrase for “welcome,” Rabbi Siegel said, but because the literal translation is “blessed are those who come,” he decided against it.
“Even basic things, like if there was a page that had a picture of a shofar, I pulled it out,” Rabbi Siegel said, referring to the ram’s horn used in High Holy Day services. “We went so far overboard, it’s crazy.”
The school board rejected Ben Gamla’s first two Hebrew curriculum proposals after finding they included religious references. The second, which relied on a textbook titled “Ha-Yesod,” asked students to translate phrases like “Our Holy Torah is dear to us” and “Man is redeemed from his sins through repentance.”
I think you'll agree that the latter would have clearly been a form of religious instruction. It's akin to making kids at a public school translate Italian phrases like "Christ is our lord and saviour."Hmm. The Irish phrase for hello is dia duit, which literally means "God be with you." I'm fairly certain that kids would learn that phrase at an Irish charter school, and I bet there'd be no objection.
I remain unconvinced that a Hebrew charter school will be ethnically diverse.Did you read the article? Here's how it starts:
Black kids and white kids are sitting together in a building that used to house a private yeshiva.And finally...
It's not exactly what you'd expect to see when you walk into the Hebrew Language Academy (HLA), a public charter school in the largely Jewish neighborhood where Midwood meets Marine Park.
But in each kindergarten classroom, you'll find just that: tables of four children, with both white and black students seated at them.
Here's why that's so unusual in New York City: At "gifted" public schools, students are often nearly all white and Asian. At the city's poorly performing public schools, students are usually all black and Latino. Even charter schools, of whatever quality, are 95 percent black or Latino....
"We're the most diverse public school in New York City," Campbell and her staff repeatedly claim. While that's a difficult thing to quantify, the numbers do show that 55 percent of families identify their children as white, 38 percent as black, 6 percent as Hispanic, and 1 percent as multiracial.
Scrutiny isn't a bad thing, if applied without prejudice.It's the "without prejudice" part I'm not sure I buy, especially given that the article tells us there's another charter school that shares a building with a church, has a pastor on its board, and has a big Noah's Ark mural in a classroom. But I'm sure it's a secular Noah's Ark mural.
And I learned the word "Ojala" in Spanish class in high school, which means "G-d Wiling." But there's clearly a difference between teaching someone a word or phrase which has religious overtones or meanings that is part of a language's common vernacular, and teaching someone random phrases that speak about redemption from sin through repentance and the Holy Torah that are have no other context than religious instruction.According to the thing that you quoted, the offending phrase that was removed from the Hebrew-language school for being religious was the Hebrew phrase for "welcome." It wasn't a random phrase about sin and redemption.
Christianity is so ingrained in some aspects of American culture that it can be hard to separate out. But we do pay attention when Christians decide to teach faith-based mythology called "intelligent design" at an equal level as science.You think it's the same thing when Christians teach Christian theology as if it's science, on the one hand, and when a language academy exists, in the context of several other language academies, that happens to teach a language that is associated with Jews?
The school board rejected Ben Gamla’s first two Hebrew curriculum proposals after finding they included religious references. The second, which relied on a textbook titled “Ha-Yesod,” asked students to translate phrases like “Our Holy Torah is dear to us” and “Man is redeemed from his sins through repentance.”
...the ultimate solution to the problem facing the African-American community was total separation from White society and the establishment of a Black Muslim state somewhere in North America or elsewhere. Furthermore, Muhammad taught that integration was a hypocritical and deceptive offer. Its intention was to deceive Black people into believing the opponents of freedom, justice, and equality were now their friends. Elijah Muhammad despised the Christian doctrine of loving one's enemy. In fact, his thinking concurred with W. D. Fard's hostile view of Christianity. Moreover, he saw the Black preacher as the greatest impediment to the progress of the Black race.You could still be right. But the idea that they turned to Islam because the Jews wouldn't let them in feels... disrespectful, somehow. As if African Americans who became Muslim are somehow being accused of settling for second best because their first, better choice was denied them.
am just going to leave this right here...Can you clarify what you think that has to do with this discussion?
Manhattan: I attended Stuyvesant High School for a year. My class was mixed White, Asian and Latino. Black students made up a substantial minority.According to this, Stuy is 65% Asian, 30% white, 3% Hispanic, and 2% black. So while the Asian and white populations may be very diverse, black and Latino students are massively under-represented. And here's a NY Times story from last year about a controversy at Hunter that stemmed from the fact that only 3% of the student body is black and 1% Hispanic. The article says that Hunter has significantly fewer black and Latino students than it did in the 1990s.
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Anyway, if the instruction is secular and they're teaching modern Hebrew rather than Biblical Hebrew, I don't see any problem here.
posted by griphus at 7:49 AM on August 8, 2011