NU Magazine – April 2010
Download the April 2010 issue of NU Magazine as a PDF document.
As an adopted Jew, I appreciate the community’s growing diversity
Judaism says, “Be fruitful and multiply,” but sometimes creating families is not that simple. Adoption is an alternative. According to the Talmud, someone who raises another’s child is viewed as if the child had been born to him.
Learning about religion is not the same as learning religion
Since this nation’s founding, church and state have been recognized as separate entities. Of course there is some blurring. This is especially the case with schools and their curricula.
How AP classes undermine real learning
Advanced Placement classes are the bane of my existence, and I imagine for many other high school students.
Seeing Israel through fresh eyes
Last December, 54 members of my extended family and many friends took a week-long trip to Israel in honor of my younger sister’s bat mitzva.
Social segregation continues into high school, although popular kids may not admit it
The four of you walk to school every morning. You eat lunch together, talk together, and spend almost every waking moment surrounded by each other.
A special lens into the lives of terminally ill kids
As Jews, we say a prayer for the sick called a “misheh-beirach.” We pray for the health of our family, friends, and Jews throughout the world. In various prayers, we thank God for our own health and well-being.
Perhaps a new governor can solve New Jersey’s fiscal, municipal, and educational woes
I am quite glad Chris Christie is the new governor, and I am quite happy the balance of Democrat to Republican in the Statehouse has become more even (it’s not 50-50, but there’s no supermajority).
A new town, a new school — and a new way of thinking about change
I always felt sympathy for teens who have to move in the middle of high school. Then I became one of the people I felt bad for.
When a Jewish day school student goes to a public high school, the transition can be arduous — and eye-opening
The transition between private and public school has stark contrasts — as dramatic as light and dark, full and empty, gray and colorful.
Standing at the start-strip, sweat oozing from their skin
Looking to the gun, which blasts a mighty sound
To wait for it is like a long car ride, it lasts forever and ever
Then BANG and GO
I never knew I liked
the view from my small bedroom window,
Overlooking the quiet street of my
Hushed town, and the lonely lamp post
That will only awaken once the rest
Of us hide away for the night.
Thoughts flit across my mind, All the answers that will bind, My future it will show, Based on all I know, My heart rate goes faster, My skin turns alabaster, All this decides my fate, “Pencils down”; time to wait, Fear inside begins to grip, All hopes start to slip, These standardized tests they force [...]
The beating of her foot was all I heard,
Thump, Thump, Thump,
I was creasing the page in the corners
Did she even know what I felt like?
This process,
Oh this process
That never ceases to end.
Hope.
The third eye saw him give her that nasty look across the table.
The third eye notices when someone’s left out but leaves them there anyway.
NU Online is published by New Jersey Jewish News
