When Ofir Ben Sheetrit sang on Israel’s The Voice, her high school suspended her, but the country went wild

By Liel Leibovitz for Tablet Magazine

Last month, when the new season of the Israeli reality show The Voice—the local version of NBC’s hit singing competition—debuted, no one expected extraordinary drama. Marching up to the studio’s stage, the eager contestants looked like the usual grab-bag of talent show aspirants: the frustrated actor, the high-school ingénue, the bartender who crooned to overcome her personal hardships, and so on.

Then it was Ofir Ben Sheetrit’s turn.

Ben Sheetrit—at 17, one of the youngest of the show’s more than 50 contestants—is a student at an Orthodox yeshiva for girls in Ashdod and the only Orthodox young woman in the competition. Before she stepped in front of the microphone, she briefly introduced herself. “I’ve loved singing ever since I was little,” she said. “I’m looking for a way to cultivate my talent.” One of the show’s producers asked her if religion would get in the way; many Orthodox Jews consider the public singing of women immodest. Ben Sheetrit smiled sweetly. “I think the Torah wants us to be happy,” she said. “It wants music to make people happy. I think you can combine Torah and music, and this is why I chose to come on the show.” With that, she started singing an Israeli classic, Ofra Haza’s “Od Mechaka La’Echad.”

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To be young, Orthodox and openly gay

Orthodox Jewish high schools in the United States try to balance concerns for their reputation and their students, as growing number of teens openly identify as gay.

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen for Haaretz

NEW YORK — Though he had lots of friends, Amram Altzman still felt alone at Ramaz High School. As a 16-year-old sophomore at the modern-Orthodox Manhattan institution, Altzman worried about what people would think, whether they would accept him, if they knew he was gay. “Being gay and being Orthodox just wasn’t something that was talked about. It was isolating,” says Altzman, now 19 and in college.

He told his closest friends first, then his parents. Before long, almost everyone at Ramaz knew that he was gay. While there were a few negative comments, Altzman felt accepted overall. At home in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, however, it was a different story. There, comments were so routinely hostile that his parents moved the family to a different community, in order to take Amram and his younger siblings out of an environment they felt could alienate their sons from Judaism altogether. And while Altzman says that he was embraced by both his friends and his family, he wishes that Ramaz handled the issue of homosexuality differently, framing it not as a sin and a chosen lifestyle, but rather as an identity.

Like a growing number of students, the topic of homosexuality is beginning to come out at Orthodox high schools in the United States. Until very recently, the norm for gay Orthodox Jews was to come out in college or later. But for a few years now there has been a marked shift. Students at Orthodox high schools who identify as gay are increasingly pushing to not only make sure that they are not overtly bullied, but also wholly accepted and able to explore what it means to be both gay and Orthodox. Now that same-sex marriage is legal in 18 U.S. states, and American attitudes are becoming, in many places, far more accepting, the challenge to Orthodox high schools is growing.

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Andrew Garfield says Spiderman is Jewish

By Talia Lavin for JTA

Andrew Garfield, a British actor most famous for playing the iconic superhero in the most recent run of Spiderman movies, has given us a new Spidey revelation in advance of ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2″: Peter Parker is totally Jewish.

“Peter Parker is not a simple dude,” the slender actor told Time Out London. “He ums and ahs about his future because he’s neurotic. He’s Jewish. It’s a defining feature.”

And as the New York Post points out, Parker grew up in historically Jewish Forest Hills, Queens, where he was a socially awkward science whiz — not atypical for a Jewish teen.

Garfield tried to allay fears that he was relying on stereotypes to categorize Jews.

“I hope Jewish people won’t mind the cliché, because my father’s Jewish. I have that in me for sure,” Garfield said.

Not mentioned by Garfield, but surely part of any Jewish Spiderman origin story, is the fact that Spiderman was originally created by Stan Lee – or Stanley Lieber – a legendary Jewish comic book creator. Lee’s conception of an orphaned teen whose moral struggles formed the crux of his story seems pretty Jewish to us. In some ways, Peter Parker comes of age when he’s snacked on by that radioactive spider. You could say it was his bite mitzvah.

Chicago Middle Schoolers Suspended Over 'Clash of Clans' Bullying

By JTA

Did Eighth-Graders Hassle Jewish Teen?

Several eighth-graders at a Chicago public school were suspended as part of an investigation of anti-Semitic bullying via the online game “Clash of Clans.”

The suspended students from Ogden International School of Chicago were identified as ringleaders and participants in the reported harassment of a 14-year-old Jewish student. Chicago Public Schools spokesman Joel Hood told the Chicago Sun-Times that they were suspended for one to three days.

The Jewish student told his mother several months ago that his classmates showed him photos of ovens and told him to get in, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

In recent weeks, the eighth-graders started a team for the online game called “Jew Incinerator.”

“Heil! Throw Jews into ovens for a cause. We are a friendly group of racists with one goal — put all Jews into an army camp until disposed of,” the team’s introduction read. The students concluded the introduction with “Sieg! Heil! — a Nazi salutation.

In a statement, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in part, “The principal at Ogden International High School has worked in cooperation with the network and central office to foster a larger community dialog around cultural sensitivity and has taken the appropriate actions to ensure this is a teachable moment for our children.”

The school principal held a forum for parents on May 29, the same day that the eighth-graders made a field trip to the Holocaust museum in Skokie.

Israeli High Schoolers Win Again in Global Physics Competition

From The Algemeiner

Youngsters from the Ilan Ramon Youth Physics Center in Beersheba, Israel notched an achievement on a global scale Wednesday by winning yet another prize in the “First Step to Nobel Prize in Physics” annual competition, widely considered the world’s most prestigious science prize for high school students.

Between 2007 and 2014, the Ramon Center has placed Israel as the world leader in prizes for physics research conducted by high schoolers. The center has won 45 total prizes during that period, leaving countries like South Korea, the U.S., and Russia far behind.

The Ramon Center operates in conjunction with physics teachers from across the Jewish state to identify the most gifted southern Israeli students. The students write their research work with the guidance of experts from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

This year, 10 of the best research projects were submitted to the prestigious U.S.-based competition, and on Thursday the students’ research projects were presented to the wider Israeli public for the first time.


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Reflections of a Day School Graduate, One Year Out

by Amram Altzman for newvoices.com

I've written before on my day school education and its different aspects, critiquing how it taught me (or perhaps should have taught me) to look at my history and my past; I’ve also offered what can perhaps be best described as a back-handed compliment to my Jewish education. Now, as someone who has been out of the pre-college Jewish educational world for almost a year, I have begun to think about the lasting impact that my twelve years of elementary and secondary Jewish education has had on me.

One the one hand, my back-handed compliment still stands: in high school especially, I was incredibly cynical, especially when it came to studying rabbinic legal texts. To a certain extent, I still am, even if I’ve elected to continue studying those very same texts as part of my higher education at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In high school, however, I found it difficult to relate to the texts that I was reading — partially because the intricacies of how to build a sukkah and whether or not it can be built in the public domain, or who is guilty of murder in the case when a baby is thrown off a roof and lands on a person carrying a sword and dies, were not relevant to my life. Interesting to ponder and debate though these legal issues may have been, they had little effect on my day-to-day interactions and realities as a Jew.

Instead, one of the most formative years for my Jewish education, and, especially my seven years of elementary and secondary Talmud education, was in eleventh grade, when I had a teacher who took the tractate we were studying, connected it to Enlightenment thinkers and biblical and contemporary texts, and forced us to synthesize those texts in a way we had not been asked to do before. For the first time, I felt that the Jewish texts weren’t talking down to me, but talking to me. This was the first time studying Jewish texts meant something to me. The rabbis of the sixth century CE were not only in conversation amongst themselves, but with me and with Søren Kierkegaard and Immanuel Kant and with rabbinic commentators. It was then that I truly felt that the texts I was studying were Not In Heaven — not in the sense that they were immutable and everlasting, but in the sense that they mattered to me and had implications for me today.

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Tijuana, Mexico's Border-Crossing Jewish Teens

by Leah Falk for Jewniverse

You might think a New York City family is making a sacrifice by renting a second apartment so their child can attend one of the city's seven specialized high schools—but try driving your kid across the U.S.-Mexico border every day.

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