JustASC

Michael Winerip in the Times rips into a proposal for a Hebrew-language charter high school in the Highland Park area, calling its latest application a “fiction.”

Among its “repeated distortions” are claims of phony endorsements. Nevertheless, writes Winerip, “the charter still may open in September”:

Part of the answer is that charter schools are a top priority for the Obama administration, making federal officials predisposed to support them.

And part of the answer, as Justin Hamilton, an Education Department spokesman, explained in an e-mail, is that federal officials see their oversight role as limited. The department hires private consultants to rate the quality of a charter applicant, but those consultants “cannot use information not included in the grant application,” he said.

In other words, if [applicant Sharon] Akman writes that Assemblyman Peter J. Barnes III supports the charter, the federal consultants are not permitted to interview Mr. Barnes, who would have been happy to tell them that he does not.

Winerip says the state may follow up on the “misrepresentations” he and the school’s opponents have alleged:

A spokesman for the state’s Education Department, Justin Barra, said in an e-mail that in the next review round for charter applications, representatives of Tikun Olam would be brought in for “an intensive in-person interview.” As for possible misrepresentations, he said: “Several individuals in the public comment process have raised concerns about potential inaccurate statements in the application. We will investigate these concerns.”

WHO OWNS ‘OCCUPY’?

Occupy Wall Street and the Jews
By Jonathan Neumann (Commentary)

Religious Extremists in Israel and How the Mainstream Must Combat It
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (The Huffington Post)

Whose Problem Is It, Anyway?
By Dovid Kornreich  (Cross Currents)

Was the Arab Spring a Victory for Extremism?
By Jeffrey Goldberg (Bloomberg.com)

The southern NJ town of Collingswood is in a heap of trouble with Michael Landon fans after officials removed a plaque honoring the hometown hero.

The mayor says the plaque honoring the star of Bonanza and Little House on the Prairie was only removed temporarily as a safety measure. “People run through the park at all hours,” he said. “You can’t see it.”

A revived Collingswood is now known as perhaps Philadelphia’s hippest suburb, full of art galleries, yoga studios, acclaimed restaurants and a hopping farmer’s market.

But when Landon — then known by his birth name, Eugene Orowitz — grew up there in the 1940s and 50s, it was a blue-collar, overwhelmingly protestant small town where a boy with a Jewish father and Roman Catholic mother had trouble fitting in.

In interviews and biographies, Landon’s childhood was always described as lonely and difficult. He was subjected to anti-Semitic taunts and teasing over his studious ways. His mother was suicidal. He was a bed-wetter into his teens and his mother would hang his wet sheets out the window of the home to embarrass him. By high school, as the story goes, Landon made a conscious effort to be a bad student but became a champion javelin thrower.

If I ever do get credit for “Kishkes Factor,” the world will wonder what other brilliant phrases I’ve coined. I make up for lost time in this week’s column:

The Gefilte Filter: In many races, the support of Jewish Democratic donors is key to viability. If a candidate successfully runs the gauntlet of pro-Israel PACs and Hollywood fund-raisers, she has passed through the Gefilte Filter.

Cel-Ray Vision: A politician’s ability to look a constituent in the eye and instantly determine whether he or she is a Jew.

Serving Pastrami: A speech to a Jewish audience featuring the phrases “I will move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem,” “The bonds between Israel and the United States are unshakable,” or “Iran will not be permitted to obtain nuclear weapons.” See “red meat.”

Stuffing the Derma: When a politician, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Jews, simply overdoes it. When Obama promised AIPAC an “undivided Jerusalem” in 2008, or Gingrich referred to Palestinians as “an invented people,” they were Stuffing the Derma. (Also known as “Varnishing the Kasha.”)

More.

Overnight Jewish reaction to Iowa:

Gal Beckerman: Last night’s “winners” (Romney, Santorum, and, to a lesser extent, Paul) pose unique challenges to Jewish voters.

Marc Tracy: The GOP establishment and Republican Jews are desperate for Romney to seal the deal. 

Shmuel Rosner: “Next time you hear about Evangelical support for Israel, remember that the Iowa Evangelical vote didn’t send … even one evangelical to the top tier.”

Ron Kampeas: The candidates had a surprising lot to say about the Middle East in their caucus speeches.

JTA asks and answers an interesting question – When Samoa aligned its clocks with other Pacific rim nations and thus forfeited the last Friday of 2011, how should Jews there have observed the (elided) Sabbath?

A Baltimore rabbi has an answer, but the more remarkable revelation in the article is that there is a place on earth without a Chabad House!  

“I don’t think there’s any island in the world that has no Jews,” Rabbi Menachem Mendel Goldstein, a Chabad emissary in New Zealand, told JTA. ”We have had an inquiry from Samoa, but every indication was that there’s basically no Jewish community of any kind whatsoever,” he said, noting that the inquiry was an email from a group of curious Protestants a year ago.

An email from the founder of Never Again is Now, an anti-Obama group dedicated to taking “action against those whose policies will bring about the obliteration of the people of Israel”:

Dear Friends.

Thank you very your unending support. Unfortunately Bomb Iran Now was sent out as the subject line of the email to represent the poster below. The subject line should have been: Call Congress, End Sanctions, Destroy Iran’s Nuclear Infrastructures Now. There were many difficulties getting this email out in a timely manner, it went on quite some time. Finally after things were ironed out, Bomb Iran was still the subject line of the email, one that I did not request. At that point I realized that this email must be sent, there was no more time to rehash what was already been decided.

Unfortunately I errored under pressure of a tight time frame, Many people wear the button, Never Again is Now, the point of the poster is to destroy Iran’s nuclear war machine, not bomb the people of Iran, I did not want any misunderstanding on this matter so I sent out this subject line retraction so the campaign and message of Never Again is Now is not compromised.

Thank you very much for your understanding and have a great new year. 

Stanley Zir
founder of Never Again is Now

Which reminds me of my favorite Jonathan Katz joke:

I had dinner tonight with my father. I made a classic Freudian slip. I meant to say, ‘Can you pass me the salt, please?” But it comes out, “You creep, you ruined my childhood.”

J.J. Goldberg analyzes Avi Chai’s 2011-12 Day School Enrollment census, which reveals a  ”modest decline overall.” However, J.J. digs deeper to discover that outside the ultra-Orthodox sector, the decline is much steeper: enrollment at the Conservative movement’s Schechter schools, to give one “calamitous” example,  dropped 35% since 1998.

Here’s his agenda-setting (or at least argument-starting) takeaway:

Day schooling isn’t catching on among non-Orthodox Jews, despite two decades and millions of dollars spent pushing the idea. The proposition that day schools are the answer to assimilation isn’t panning out.

Joe Berger, the New York Times’ “What’s new with the Jews?” reporter, is a treasure. Enjoy this paragraph from yesterday’s report on the first-ever index to the Babylonian Talmud:

The index represents seven years of work, but do not ask Daniel Retter why he undertook it, unless you have a spare hour. His answers are as meandering as the Talmud itself, with pathways leading to byways leading to offshoots that sometimes end in cul-de-sacs. Along the way, his voice sometimes rises and falls in Talmudic singsong, and his eyes glitter with delight at the saga’s oddities.

The Star-Ledger editorializes against a Hebrew Language Charter High School:

The state’s priority needs to be protecting that option in the urban districts, and that means it should take care to avoid provoking opposition in the suburbs by approving charter schools where they are not needed.

Take, for example, a Hebrew language charter proposed for New Brunswick. If approved, it may accept students from the largely Jewish suburb of Highland Park, provided it doesn’t get enough from Edison or New Brunswick.

It’s a good example of a charter plan that should not be approved. No, there is nothing wrong with a public school that teaches Hebrew, or a charter for suburban kids. Good districts can be complacent about their offerings, and language immersion may be better.

The real issue is that this charter has failed to make a compelling case that it’s needed — or even wanted. Too many questions remain unanswered. Why are the mostly black and Latino students of New Brunswick best served by a Hebrew school? Why does Highland Park, which already has a successful high school offering Hebrew and plenty of private Jewish schools, need a Hebrew charter, too?

Besides, another Hebrew charter opened last year in East Brunswick and has yet to prove itself. Shouldn’t we wait to see if that K-3 school successfully expands up to eighth grade as promised, before opening a second one for older students?

Many families that want their kids to learn Hebrew are paying tuition at private schools today. If all this charter accomplishes is to transfer kids from a private school to one paid for by tax dollars, how is that addressing an unmet educational need?

Read our story about the latest developments here.