#jewish high school

[adrabas]

How Jewish Studies in High School Cultivates Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking is an essential skill in education today, preparing students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information effectively. But how can Jewish studies foster this ability? At ADRABA, an institution offering accredited Jewish high school courses in Ontario, the curriculum does more than teach traditional subjects—it equips students with the tools to think critically about their world.

How Does Jewish Studies Encourage Critical Thinking?

Jewish education often centers around interpretation and debate. In Talmudic study, for example, students are encouraged to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and look for alternative viewpoints. Could there be a better method to develop critical thinking skills? By delving into ancient texts, students learn to approach complex ideas with curiosity and open-mindedness, building their analytical capacity. These are the same critical skills necessary for success in both academics and life.

Integration with Modern Studies

Jewish studies at ADRABA aren’t isolated from the general Ontario high school curriculum. In fact, they blend seamlessly with other accredited subjects, reinforcing critical thinking through multidisciplinary approaches. Imagine a student learning about World War II in their history class while simultaneously exploring the Jewish perspective on the Holocaust in their Jewish studies course. The ability to view the same event from different lenses deepens understanding and promotes sophisticated reasoning.

Can Critical Thinking Impact Career Success?

Absolutely. Critical thinking isn't confined to academia; it’s a vital skill in the workplace, too. Whether a student aspires to become a lawyer, doctor, or entrepreneur, being able to evaluate information and make informed decisions is essential. ADRABA’s focus on both Jewish education and Ontario-accredited courses ensures that students develop this critical skillset, preparing them for university and beyond.

Real-World Applications

Let’s consider a real-world example: students studying ethical dilemmas in Jewish law are asked to debate modern issues like medical ethics or social justice. How does ancient wisdom apply to contemporary challenges? This reflective process forces students to connect historical perspectives with today’s complex realities—an exercise in deep critical thinking.

Why ADRABA?

With a focus on both Jewish and secular education, ADRABA offers a holistic approach to learning. By fostering curiosity, debate, and critical thinking, students are well-prepared not just for graduation but for a future where they can navigate complex global issues.

In conclusion, accredited Jewish high school courses at ADRABA offer Ontario students a unique opportunity to develop critical thinking. This approach to education, rooted in Jewish traditions and combined with modern subjects, ensures that students leave high school ready for academic and personal success.

[mysharona1987]

[ashinafantasy]

I'm Jewish. I'm also a freshman in high school. I have World History first period, and at the beginning of every class, my teacher asks if we have any current events or news to share.

Today when he asked the question, I bought up how it was the anniversary of the October 7th attacks. He said I was right, explained to the class what I was talking about, and mentioned that about four hundred people were killed.

When I corrected him that it was over a thousand (I couldn't think of the exact number off the top of my head), he replied, "Well, we don't know for sure."

Not wanting to make a scene in front of my classmates, I shut my mouth, but couldn't help but fathom over the fact that a social studies teacher knows less about the October 7th attacks than your average Jewish teenager. I saw no one post about October 7th today other than Jews. No one brought up October 7th in any of my classes other than me. I had to explain to my friends what it was when I tried to talk to them about it. I watched the PBS News special about October 7th with my dad tonight, and it angered me that no one gives a shit about what they went through. No one is marching on college campuses for the Nova Festival victims, no one is in the streets fighting for the return of the hostages. But please, scream at me how I'm a Nazi for agreeing with the idea of a Jewish nation state. No one will fight for the Jews other than ourselves.

[ravenssunshine]

jewish day school miku wearing a short skirt with leggings underneath, a short sleeve shirt that’s barely cropped with a zip up hoodie over it to cover the crop when teachers come by. thirty seven tabs open on her macbook including sefaria (x3 probably) and google translation hebrew to english AND english to hebrew (she did not do her homework). curly hair in dutch braids with judaica bracelets and necklaces. and she loves a cappella

[stbot]

I've been thinking lately... maybe I should stop worrying so much about why I feel something and just feel it.

[a-s-fischer]

Antisemitism and the Nazi Worldview: a Guide for the Perplexed

While most people know the Nazis hated Jews, few people understand just how integral Jew-hate was to the Nazi philosophy. This leads into many of the misconceptions about Nazis and the holocaust that regularly pop up, so it bears discussing what Nazis believed about racism and the Jews.

The Nazi conception of "race" was much narrower and "scientific" than we think of it today. The Nazi conception of race was that humans were split into subgroups with distinct traits, that set them apart from each other and gave them advantages in a great and bloody contest of the races. These races pattern on better to ethnicities, nationalities, or even language groups, than race as we think of it today, which is why it would make sense in a Nazi framework to talk about an Irish race, or a Polish race, for example. And of course in the Nazi mind, these races were a real biological reality, and not a social and cultural construct, and the strength and purity of a fit race might be lost through race mixing.

And of course races were differently fit or unfit, superior or inferior, and through the races warring against each other in a battle of the fittest, the superior race would rise above the rest, and subjugate the earth. Hitler came of age in a time of scarcity, war, and famine, and he believed there was no way to feed the entirety of the human race, so eliminating the lesser races through this perpetual struggle of races against each other was the only way for humanity to survive. It was all very Darwinian except that it completely misunderstood how the Darwinian model of evolution actually works, since the unit of selection was the nonexistent race, not the individual.

This struggle of the races was in Hitler and the Nazis' conception not only natural and necessary, but good. Conquest and the slaughter of inferior races was good. The state of the world with nation states and silly notions like laws, and morals, this was bad and unnatural. Humanity, or the strongest race, needed to do away with this system, or humans would all perish of starvation in a degenerate race-mixed scrum. The Nazis were heros, looking to save humanity from this foul unnatural state it had been tricked into adopting.

Tricked by the machinations of one race. One race had broken away from the others, and learned how to hack the system, to survive over under the rule of other races, when it should have been destroyed as a weaker lesser race. This race figured out how to lie and cheat, and live off other races as a parasite, while controlling them from within with fake, unnatural, vile concepts of laws, ethics, notions of justice and compassion, human rights, and international cooperation. And also with money. That race was the Jews.

In the Nazi mind, other races might be lesser, weaker, worthy only of a slow starvation under Nazi rule, but Jews, Jews were unique, special. Weak but cunning, only the Jews had figured out how to subvert and pervert the noble struggle of the races. The Jews were not only especially hated in the Nazi mind but they also served an explanatory purpose. The Jews were the reason humans were not in what the Nazis viewed as a state of nature, and the reason that the areas hadn't eliminated all the other races and taken over the world already. And anything that went wrong for the Nazis was of course caused by Jewish manipulation. The Jews had to be stripped of their unnatural power and control, and eliminated quickly, to keep them from continuing to undermine the strongest race, the Aryan Germans.

Early on, there was some discussion about how this was to be done. The mass slaughter of Jews under this philosophy might have been inevitable but it wasn't obviously inevitable to all Nazis. The important thing was to reduce the Jews to a state of nature, to take away their unnatural control, and leave them in the position of any other lesser race. This is where ideas, like sending all the Jews to Madagascar, to "build their own state" but really to inevidably die in the wilderness, came from. If Jews were separated from their stronger hosts, the logic went, they would just be one more weaker race and they would die just the same. This was also why so many Nazis took a special delight in simply denying captive Jews the means of survival, leaving them to starve, freeze, and die of disease in a state of nature, without the resources they had parasitically leached out of their host races.

But that process took too long. There were simply too many Jews, and too many (to the Nazi mind) Jewish controlled enemies. As Germany and the Axis' began to lose the war, and then as that loss became increasingly only a matter of time, the Nazis ramped up their efforts to kill Jews, by bullet and by gas, because if they could kill enough Jews, surely that Jewish control over their enemies would break and the Aryans among those enemies what recognize their racial interest, and join with the Germans, giving them victory. Instead the resources poured into the wholesale murder of Jews were resources stripped from the Nazi war machine, hastening the Allied victory.

Antisemitism wasn't simply one more bigotry for the Nazis to tack onto their general racism. It was foundational to the Nazi conception of how the world functioned. It was the explanitory mechanism in the Nazis' conspiratorial framework. And with this philosophy at the core of Nazism, the Holocaust became not only inevitable, but the highest calling of the Nazis, their sacrifice for humanity, or at least what was left of humanity after the strongest race had triumphed over all the others. Very little about Nazism is unique. Their militarism, their glorification of violence and struggle, their racial pseudo-Darwinianism, certainly their conspiratorial antisemitism, all had plenty of precident long before they came on the scene. It was their particularly potent combination of these existing elements that made them Nazis. And in this combination, it was the Jew-hate which held everything together and which provided the energizing force.

[thethornpatch]

Me reading the list of biblical, classical, Shakespearean, and poetic references Tamsyn Muir put in The Locked Tomb: "I am so deeply uncultured, I got none of these" Me reading the list of memes in TLT: "I got almost every one! That counts for something, right?"

[determinate-negation]

Any thoughts on Finkelstein?

i respect him a lot for what hes done in shifting the discourse on palestine, especially as an anti zionist jew who is very vocal and unrepentant about it. in college we had him speak at our jewish voice for peace event and he yelled at this right wing zionist kid we hated so it was cool. it seems like hes on a weird like ironic podcast cumtown dimes square adjacent loop right now getting interviewed by adam friedland and the like? which is a bummer but its not really surprising to me that he would get involved in bs cancel culture war shit, since he was actually cancelled in a more real way than most of these people, and also has a tendency to be very contrarian and kind of offensive. i wish he was not on this anti woke shit because hes so great at arguing with zionists. so i have my critiques, even in his own writing that i feel is very valuable, like his book the holocaust industry. i think has some very crucial ideas and criticism in it but also has quite a few flaws, in this article it goes into it. i think his strength lies more as like a polemic speaker and public figure than like as a writer.

also this video is the best and i just love his voice.

[grecoromanyaoi]

omg I thought you knew this already but basically the polish soldiers napoleon sent to suppress the haitian revolution ended up siding with the rebelling slaves instead, so they became the only white people welcome there and the government officially classified them as noir (black)

HUH. interesting.

[challahbeloved]

I gave my brother a kippah the other day, and he almost immediately forgot he was wearing it and accidentally dropped it into the toilet.

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Slowly realizing that I was taught twice as much about the bubonic plague than I was about the shoah. I feel like that's telling. We never learned anything about the shoah specifically, just that the axis and allied powers existed, that Pearl Harbor happened, and we won. Because those are, apparently, the only important parts of WWII

[beggars-opera]

Parallels Between My Catholic Elementary School Experience and the Salem Witch Trials That Should Not Have Happened:

My principal was a tyrannical nun and became incensed when she realized that the entire student body did not know their prayers. I cannot for the life of me remember how she came to this apparently stunning but unsurprising realization, considering we were a school and not a convent. However, she decided to rectify this by bringing a toy voice recorder/microphone to my fifth grade classroom and forcing everyone to stand at the front of the room and recite the Lord's Prayer into it, berating the students who didn't get it right. One girl who was definitely not raised Catholic kept messing up because she was intimidated and crying and our teacher had to step in and make the principal stop.

Also one time she almost ran over one of my friends with her car but for some reason I cannot imagine Judge William Stoughton recklessly driving a carriage.

[ashinafantasy]

a complete (i think) list of bullshit my world history teacher has done this year alone

said the october 7th death toll was only 400, and when I corrected him that it was 1200, said "we don't know for sure"

incorrectly defined genocide

incorrectly defined white nationalism

called universal healthcare "free healthcare"

gave us an assignment on tenth grade geometry (i'm a freshman) that (despite over half of the class failing it) he put in the gradebook

said that being arab means you speak arabic and nothing else (we're supposed to do a unit on the middle east soon send help)

^ he then called himself english because he speaks english (he is a canadian living in the us)

interrogated three hijabi girls in front of the whole class about being from arab countries and speaking arabic despite two of them being somali and attempted to use it as part of the lesson

gave us a graded assignment on grammar (this man's grammar is worse than mine. i'm 14.)

interrupts me ALL THE FUCKING TIME to either reword or repeat what i just said and replace the correctness with misinformation

[pressedpenn]

I go to a Zionist school.

I want to start this off by saying that I AM NOT ZIONIST. I go to a Jewish school that is very Zionist and pro Israel, constantly they are shoving Israeli propaganda down our throats. In class they show us videos about the IDF, showing that they are all kind and supportive. My Hebrew class is all about how good Israel is, and unfortunately I have to go along with it. I do try to engage as little as I can, sitting out of videos and not paying attention to the videos that they show. You might be asking, why dont you just not engage? I have to engage, at the beginning of the genocide one of my friends was posting por-palestine media on their own social media, after about a week they were "asked to leave the school". I cant go to another school, I'm trans and I live in Florida, if I go to a different school I will be misgendered and discriminated against. I want to spread the word that Zionist schools are spreading propaganda to their students and their families. Most of my classmates are very very pro-israel. One even going so far as to say that all palestinians should die. I know that this is very badly written but I'm not trying to write a professional essay, just to say to people that there are many people that are delusional with the pro-israel and anti-palestine propaganda. I can't stand to see some of my closest friends clap at the videos of murderers.

Just last week they showed us a presentation during an assembly about the "situation" in Gaza. I was fuming the whole time because they didn't even give us the numbers of the citizens killed and injured in gaza, they just showed a video of a soldier being reunited with his kid. If you read to here, thank you. This post is not to boost myself nor to put down anyone, just to bring awareness of what it is like on the other side. think of me as a secret informant for the information being given to high schoolers. Please reblog and share this, please let people know what is happening in jewish schools

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

By Susan Edelman and Georgia Worrell

Hundreds of “radicalized” kids rampaged through the halls of a Queens high school this week for nearly two hours after they discovered a teacher had attended a pro-Israel rally — forcing the terrified educator to hide in a locked office as the teen mob tried to push its way into her classroom, The Post has learned.

The mayhem at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica unfolded shortly after 11 a.m. Monday in what students called a pre-planned protest over the teacher’s Facebook profile photo showing her at a pro-Israel rally on Queens Oct. 9 holding a poster saying, “I stand with Israel.”

“The teacher was seen holding a sign of Israel, like supporting it,” a senior told The Post this week.

“A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.”

Hundreds of kids flooded into hallways and ran amok, chanting, jumping, shouting, and waving Palestinian flags or banners.

Many tried to barge into the teacher’s classroom despite school staffers blocking their entry.

“Everyone was yelling ‘Free Palestine!’” a senior said.

“Everyone was screaming ‘(The teacher) needs to go!’” a ninth-grader said.

School administrators and the NYPD, which responded to the school at about 11:20 am, got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door, another educator said.

Students recorded the commotion, posting multiple videos, some set to pulsing Arabian music, on TikTok.

[hebrewbyinbal]

🎒 This is the most famous beginning of the school year in Israel - though it really applies to first graders only!

📚 September 1st marks the start of the school year in Israel, and that’s why this Sunday’s email will be all about going to school in Israel... and of course, in Hebrew!

Don’t want to miss out?

Make sure you’re getting my Sunday emails!

If you’re not on the list yet, just comment "email" and we’ll get you signed up before Sunday 😊✉️

Wishing all kids - big and small - a wonderful beginning of the school year 👩‍🏫