ANNOUNCING: New Voices’ First Ever Essay Contest

We’re proud to announce our first ever Middle School/High School Israel Essay Contest.

Every summer, thousands of high schoolers pile onto tour buses to traipse around the Holy Land. Some travelers return home spiritually awakened, others with a new view of Israel’s political climate. They come back full of ideas, angst and passion. And New Voices wants to hear all about it – and give our readers an inside view of those experiences.

We want students to explain how they would finish the following sentence: “The Thing They Don’t Tell You About Israel Is….”  The essay should explore something unexpected you saw, learned, experienced, questioned, etc. on your trip to Israel. Think about ways in which Israel defied your expectations. You might consider some of the following things:

What no one told you about Israel (but that perhaps you wish they had)
Something that surprised you about the people there (Jewish Israelis, Arab Israelis, Palestinians, other students or tourists)
Surprising elements of the daily life in Israel that you saw
A realization about Israeli art, music, politics and/or pop culture
Your essay should focus on a personal experience of Israel that went beyond what you learned in Sunday school, day school, youth group — and any other formal Jewish educational programs you may have been a part of.

Plus we’re giving away $100, $75 and $50 Amazon.com gift cards to the top three winners.


See below for our FAQs about the contest.

What is the New Voices Israel Essay Contest?
A new contest for students in grades 8-12 to talk about their experiences in Israel and win a gift card at Amazon.com. The winning entries, three prize winners and three honorable mentions, will be published on our website in mid-May.

Who can submit entries?
 Continue reading. 

New study offers tips on engaging Jewish teens

Trying to interest teenagers in activities is difficult, parents and teachers know well, especially given what technology has done to the attention spans of young people.

So how to get them to partake in doing Jewish over other pursuits?

The Jim Joseph Foundation commissioned two consulting firms to carry out a two-year study to figure it out. BTW Informing Change and Rosov Advisors mined data from 21 organizations geared toward Jewish and non-Jewish teens.

Their conclusions: Hire good staff, be flexible on attendance and target teens through social media.

As a teen might say, “Duh!”

“People who know the teen space well will not be shocked by the findings, but they are important realizations for anyone involved in the field,” said Josh Miller, the senior program manager at the Jim Joseph Foundation, which has invested $270 million to promote Jewish education since 2006.

The $200,000 study, which cost $40,000 to print and disseminate according to a spokesperson, comes at a time when the majority of young American Jews are not enrolled in Jewish schools.

According to a 2008 paper commissioned by the Avi Chai Foundation, an estimated 460,000 American Jews—about 45 percent of the school-aged demographic—are enrolled in either Jewish day schools or Jewish supplementary education. Participation in Jewish activities outside school hours was lower.

The Jim Joseph Foundation’s study offers 10 “implications for strategy development” aimed at boosting those numbers. Among them: Accept teens as they are. Don’t punish kids who show up irregularly for events. Create a recognizable brand. And, perhaps most important, find good staff to mentor teens.

“You might call them Pied Pipers, people who can create a relationship with others,” said Jerry Somers, a board member at the Jim Joseph Foundation. “This is very essential to establishment of strong engagement.”

The paper notes that younger staffers tend to be better at forging such ties with adolescents, but cautions that employees in their early 20s have a higher turnover rate than those in their late 20s and early 30s.

It also recommends using digital tools such as Facebook and text messaging to reach teens, citing the success of DoSomething.org, a website that motivates youths to partake in social activism and has pioneered the use of texts to stay in touch with its user base.

Continue reading. 

The First—and Only—Jewish Miss America

In September of 1945, just after the end of World War II, a young woman from the Bronx named Bess Myerson became the first—and, still, only—Jewish woman to win the title of Miss America.
But winning the crown was just the beginning of the battle. Myerson was urged by the pageant director to change her name to sound less Jewish and, unlike most Miss Americas before her, Myerson did not pose with Ford cars or model Catalina bathing suits. "Those companies didn't want a Jewish woman representing them," Myerson recalled in an interview.
After being denied entrance to a southern country club that didn't admit Jews, Myerson accepted a post with the Anti-Defamation League, speaking out about religious and racial discrimination. Later, Myerson successfully pursued a career in television—as a panelist and MC on popular 1950s shows—as well as in politics, as New York's first Commissioner of Consumer Affairs.
While three more decades would pass before a woman of color took the Miss America crown, Myerson's groundbreaking win helped Americans see another image of beauty. Nearly 70 years later, Myerson is still gracing New York City with her eloquence and vivacity.

Bernard Malamud, The Clumsy Teenage Writer

Before he wrote The Fixer and won the Pulitzer Prize, Bernard Malamud, like so many before him, was a humble high school student who submitted an essay to the Scholastic Art and Writing Award for teenagers. Unlike so many before him, he won.

The essay — about working in his father's grocery store — begins hesitantly. You can practically hear the 18-year-old clearing his throat, prevaricating over the best way to begin. But the story is rich and engaging, with a large cast of memorable characters: a "thin, pinched, little girl" miserable with poverty; a "richly dressed" woman who "heaved, rocked, tossed, and creaked" at a botched order; a delinquent kid who makes good for himself when Malamud's father declines to drop charges for theft.

Even when his writing veers into over-exuberance, it is full of sharp observations and startling imagery. We see glimpses of the writer Malamud was to become: a master of lyrical language and vernacular, preoccupied with class and social injustice. "I have seen the veneer scraped off life, exposing its plain, dull surface. Somehow, I have become less selfish, and more satisfied with my lot." This is talent in the raw — a short, must-read for fans of Jewish and American fiction.

Your Inner Teenager

I have always had a covert attraction to the "Wicked Child" of the Seder. Maybe it was the totally-out-of-place pictures smack at the beginning of the Passover Haggadah. Here we were celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, and there's a picture of some ruffian (always with a cigarette) teasing our imagination. It seemed so out of place. It made a profound impact on my young mind. Perhaps that's why I became a rabbi. After all, I didn't want to turn out like that wicked son. On the other hand, part of me definitely did; after all, he was so cool looking.

After years of study and concealed longing, I found that I was not alone in my "Wicked" appreciation. The four children of the Haggadah are actually taken straight out of the Bible. There are four different dialogues (okay, one is really a monologue) in four different places of how to respond to our children. And here is the amazing thing, in the Passover Haggadah we start with the Wise Son. But if we take a look in the Torah, the very first son who is given attention is the Wicked Son!

And it shall come to pass when you come to the land which G‑d will give you, according to His promise, that you shall keep this service of observing Passover. And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say to you, "What the heck are you guys doing?" —Exodus 12:25-26 (paraphrased)

This refers to the wicked son. —Rashi

The entire family is together doing one thing; in walks this child and rejects whatever it is that is going on. Sounds to me like the archetypical teenager. (If you are a teenager, I mean no offense. Since you are reading this article, you are atypical.)

Why does the Torah start with this child? Of all of the possible types of responses that our children may have through the generations, this is the first one? And even before we leave Egypt, G‑d is telling us that in the future, your kids will give you lip. I guess it is full disclosure.

Continue reading.

Preparing with your teen for Passover

This year we are slaves. Next year, may we all be free. --Passover Haggadah

Each year, through the Passover seder, we re-enact the experience of our people’s liberation from slavery to freedom. The Haggadah commands us that in every generation we are to experience the seder as if we ourselves went out from Egypt to freedom. The seder reminds us that while we are not literally slaves, our freedom may be affected by old attitudes, negative thoughts, overwhelming worries or out-of-sync values. “Slavery does offer a certain freedom that can be attractive: the freedom from responsibility for yourself and others, the freedom from having to establish goals, figure out how to reach them, or think beyond the moment. It takes strength and guts to walk out of a known situation, which for all its pain, is predictable. It is human nature to want to stay put within the stability of the status quo.” (Ross, “Self Liberation” in Celebrate! The Complete Jewish Holiday Handbook) But Judaism has never been satisfied with the status quo and each year, with the coming of spring and the acknowledgement of new growth and renewal, we remind ourselves and teach our children that freedom is a worthy goal. For teens who are gaining more freedoms, the holiday can teach the message that freedom also comes with responsibility. For our ancestors in Egypt, freedom meant entering into a covenantal relationship with God. It was only after we were freed that we were given the Ten Commandments, which obligated us in ways that continue to forge our relationship with the Divine.  Like our ancestors in Egypt, we can escape from the things that enslave us, the things that hold us back. Once the Israelites encountered God and saw that God could bring them into freedom, “they gave up the comfort of the familiar, without concern for provisions or how they would get to or exist at their destination. They left Egypt because they believed a better life awaited them elsewhere. As Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav counseled, when you are about to leave [Egypt] ‘mitzrayim’ you should not worry about how you will manage in a new ‘place.’ Anyone who does or who stops to get everything in order for the journey will never pick himself or herself up.” (Ross)  Questions to think about:

Parents and teens often have unique struggles over the issue of freedom. Below are some questions to help you explore the issue together.
What makes a person free?
In what ways are you enslaved?
What does it mean for you as a teen when you get new freedoms?
What does it mean to you as a parent to give your teens new freedom?
What would you like to be freed from in this coming year?
How can we help each other gain new freedoms? Work together to identify those responsibilities your teenagers must undertake as they enjoy more freedoms and what your teens can do to alleviate concerns you face as you allow more freedom.

Write a prayer to include in your seder During Passover, we celebrate and thank God for delivering us from Egypt by singing Dayeinu (It would have been enough). We enumerate each step along the way, recognizing that each one was a miracle—parting the sea, providing for us in the desert, giving us Shabbat, bringing us to Mount Sinai, giving us the Torah, and more. At this time of year, while we remember our own oppression and redemption from Egypt, we often forget that Jews around the world are still oppressed whether by their governments or as a result of the economies they live in. Take some time with your family to learn about these communities. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has information about Jewish communities all over the world who have yet to experience all the freedoms we have come to cherish. Learn about a few and then write a prayer to include in your seder that will teach your family and friends about this community as you pray that they may soon know the freedom that you do.

Continue reading.

Negotiating with Teens

Negotiating with teens when they say “been there, done that!”

The entire school was taking a trip to the relatively new National Museum of American Jewish History, located in Philadelphia. The museum, with thousands of historic treasures, interactive exhibits, and multi-media presentations, has caused many people to say that they could spend days there and not see everything.

Yet, we heard that one student, when he learned about the trip, went home and confidently told his mother: “I don’t want to go. I've lready been to the museum once.”

The comment above is not specific to the museum. It is a catch phrase for all things that kids think they've already done, if they've done it once.

I remember working with a student on his course selections for the coming year. I suggested a class that I thought he’d find really interesting, based on his background. He didn't ask me any clarifying questions, and without missing a quarter-note, told me assertively: “I don’t need to take that class, I've already taken Talmud!”

Put in whatever word works for you here, so that the comment would be equally humorous:

“I don’t need to take that class, I've already taken engineering.” (architecture, medicine, fine arts, or any area of study that could be endlessly interesting if someone had the interest).

So, how as parents and educators do we get past the “been there, done that” syndrome?

With patience, explanations, and the confidence that we know better.

We should never assume because someone is in school, that there is a deep understanding of the process of learning.

We need the confidence to communicate that when it comes to learning anything, revisits are important and necessary. Gaining depth of a subject matter, seeing things again from a new perspective, is a good thing.

Let’s think about that, and let that very thought bring sweet smiles to our faces when we meet at our Seder tables and hear “But we did this last year!”