Under the aegis of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life, Mega-philanthropist and former hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt and others plan to back The Hebrew Language Academy Charter School, which is to be opened in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn.
Steinhardt's daughter Sara Berman will be the charter applicant of record. She is a journalist with the NY Sun, in which Steinhardt is a major investor and which took a strong stance against the Khalil Gibran International Academy and its founding principal Debbi Almontaser.
The following three articles discuss the proposed charter school:
Steinhardt is one of the initial funders of the Birthright Israel Program and has worked with other Jewish mega-philanthropists to strengthen a Jewish Zionist identity among American Jews.
"Thomas W. Carroll [who] played a key role in the adoption of New York's charter-school law [and who] is now president of the Albany-based Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability" writes in the NY Post:
The school would cover the core academic subjects, but be the first New York charter school to also offer Hebrew-language instruction. (A few regular New York public schools offer Hebrew as a foreign-language elective.) It would also teach about Jewish culture and history and modern Israeli society.
That approach is similar to that of the Hellenic Charter School in Brooklyn, which pairs instruction in classical Greek and Latin with classes in Greek culture and history. Other language/culture charter schools in New York include Amber Charter School in Washington Heights and the Eugenio Maria de Hostos Charter School in Rochester, which both feature instruction in Spanish and in Hispanic cultures.
The Forward reports:
According to Steinhardt's daughter, Sara Berman, a trustee for the foundation and the lead applicant in the effort, the school's curriculum would incorporate Hebrew-language instruction, as well as classes that cover Jewish culture and history and modern Israeli society.
The Forward adds:
Over the past year, [Steinhardt] had talked up the possibility of Hebrew charter schools as a new and cheaper way to strengthen Jewish communal identity.
"What if we unrolled a nationwide system of Jewish charter schools focusing on Jewish elements, not on religious studies, which appeals only to a minority of Jews anyway, but on the elements of Jewish culture that make us strong?"
The Forward notes:
The legal requirement that public schools steer clear of religion has required charter school backers to walk a delicate line in talking up their merits in promoting Jewish identity.
The subtitle in the NY Jewish Week proclaims:
Not for Jews only: Jewish identity, Zionism not part of proposed Sheepshead Bay grade school.
Berman explains in the NY Jewish Week that there is an association between the State of Israel and teaching Hebrew.
"If you're studying French, you will learn about going to the boulangerie to pick up a baguette.You'll imagine yourself in Paris. Here, you'll learn there is a place called Israel. And this is what secular life is like there."
The NY Jewish Week notes:
[Muslim activist Adem] Carroll ... wondered aloud about what connection, if any, the school would have to the government of Israel. He noted that when Khalil Gibran started up, detractors voiced fear that "a Palestinian narrative would find its way into the curriculum."
The NY Jewish Week also informs:
Steinhardt [feels that] Russian Jews would seem a natural constituency for the new school he is backing.
Steinhardt and his daughter are being completely dishonest. The Hebrew Language Academy Charter School is not a secular non-racial school teaching Hebrew. The unstated intent is the indoctrination of a Zionist Jewish identity, for the school does not teach secular Israeli culture. It teaches secular Israeli Jewish culture.
If the school were truly teaching students about secular Israeli culture, it would give equal time to secular Arabic culture. Even though the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (probably incorrectly) indicates that only 20% of the Israeli citizen population is Arabic, at least 40% of the people under the control of the Israeli government are Arabic. To ignore their secular culture is to teach racism and is totally inconsistent with the mission of the NY City public school system. Giving proper attention to Arabic secular culture means giving equal time to the teaching of Arabic.
Steinhardt is using his wealth to create facilities, whose quality will seduce Russian and Israeli Jewish immigrant parents with no interest in Israeli Jewish culture to put their children into a program that will inculcate a Hebrew Jewish Zionist identity despite parental wishes by means of carefully crafted textbooks that are produced in the USA.
The sneakiness of Steinhardt's plan is clear to anyone that has lived among Russian Jews. They are openly contemptuous of Israeli Hebrew culture and almost invariably want to maintain their Russian language culture. Steinhardt is simply offering the parents a big bribe for the opportunity to Hebraicize and Zionize their children to Israeli Jewish racial prejudices and concepts.
Every aspect of the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School is despicable.
If Steinhardt and Berman really wanted to created an Hebrew language school tied into secular Israeli culture, they would have used the
Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam bicultural model.
If they really wanted to create a school for Russian Jews, the charter school would have focused on Russian langauge and culture.
In his novel
Absurdistan Russian American Jewish author Gary Shteyngart gives a sense of Russian Jewish attitudes toward Jewish "heritage." As a minister in the revolutionary Absurdistan government, Misha Vainberg, son of a recently assassinated Russian Jewish mafioso, develops a program to gain the love of the world (pp. 266-272).
It was time to take action. It was time to "talk to Israel."
And then a modern miracle happened. Nanabragov's men finally installed a high-speed Internet connection in my office. I whipped out my laptop, jammed its little dickey into a wall socket, and powered up the World Wide Web.
Reems of information eagerly floated onto my screen. Several dull websites demonstrated rather clearly what a grant proposal looked like. Ilearned about the soul-searching expeditions of contemporary American Jews from the banks of Poland's Vistula River to the extinguished shtetls of Bessarabia. I learned about the average American Jew's curious if misplaced interest in something called "kabbalah." As for the Holocaust, few genocides were better documented. I drank some coffee, touched myself, and began my duties as the Minister of Multicultural Affairs.
A Modest Proposal
Project Name
The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies, aka the Museum of Sevo-Jewish Friendship.
Project Overview
The greatest danger facing American Jewry is our people's eventual assimilation into the welcoming American fold and our subsequent extinction as an organized community. Due to the overabundance of presentable non-Jewish partners in a country as tantalizingly diverse and half-naked as America, it is becoming difficult if not impossible to convince young Jews to engage in reproductive sex with each other. Efforts to connect Jews of reproductive age through professional social networks and alcohol-fueled "meat markets" have had limited success. Israel, once a source of pride and inspiration, is now populated largely by an aggressive Middle-Eastern people whose bizarre lifestyle is thoroughly incompatible with our own (cf. Greenblatt, Roger, "Why Does Humus Leave a Bitter Taste in My Mouth?" "Annals of Modern Jewry," Indiana University Press). It is time to turn to the most effective, time-tested, and target-specific arrow in our quiver — The Holocaust.
Even among the most thoroughly secular and unaffiliated young Jews, the Holocaust enjoys great name recognition. When asked to identify the following eight components central to Jewish identity —Torah, Mishna, Talmud, Holocaust, Mikvah, Whitefish, Israel, Kabbalah — only Whitefish scored higher than the Holocaust in a survey of thirty drunk Jews at a nightclub in suburban Maryland (cf. Greenblatt, Roger, "Oy! What a Feeling, I'm Jewish," "Annals of Modern Jewry," Indiana University Press). The Holocaust, when harnessed properly as a source of guilt, shame, and victimhood, can serve as a remarkable tool for Jewish Continuity. The problem is the over-saturation of the Holocaust brand in media and academe, creating the need for a fresh, vibrant, and sexy (yes, sexy — let's keep our eyes on the prize) approach to the mother of all genocides.
The newly independent Sevo Republic, run under the democratic and Israel-friendly auspices of the State Committee for the Restoration of Order and Democracy (SCROD), is a small but attractive nation-state on the shores of the beautiful Caspian Sea. The history of Sevo-Jewish friendship runs as deep as the waters of the Caspian. Both are educated, entrepreneurial, and maligned people fighting with their much larger oxlike neighbors for their share of love, recognition, and adequate living space. In 1943, as Hitler's Operation Barbarossa thundered toward the peaceful oil reserves of the Caspian, the Sevo populace began a voluntary campaign to transport the native Jewish population out of the republic and toward safety in Stalin's Siberia. Today the country remains easily the most Jew-tolerant place on earth outside of Brookline, Massachusetts. This philo-Semitism, combined with an exotic location, the chance to enjoy the hospitality of a righteous people (finally an entire nation of tzadikim), and the opportunities of a temperate, beach-filled landscape most reminiscent of Cancún, Mexico (only cheaper, much cheaper), creates the perfect environment for an education-based initiative that is a world apart from the hackneyed death marches of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Yad Vashem.
Methodology
A Striking Architectural Design
Some of the world's most remarkable recent architecture has been built in commemoration of the Holocaust, but much of it is too abstract and cerebral to inspire immediate Continuity in the loins of a frigid Jewish woman in her thirties. The Institute for Caspian Holocaust Studies will take the shape of a giant broken matzoh, in reference to the tragedy that befell our people and as a reminder of the Passover meal, which, among all the traumas of a Jewish upbringing, consistently rates as the "least scarring" (cf. Greenblatt, Roger, "Why on This Night of All Nights Do I Take Only One Milligram of Lorazepam?," "Annals of Modern Jewry," Indiana University Press). The main exhibition space of the broken matzoh will lead to a titanium-clad lamb shank (hint: Frank Gehry) symbolizing both the forearm of the Almighty and our own newly found brute strength.
The New Tribalism
Identity politics are a great boon to our quest for Continuity. Identity is born almost exclusively out of a nation's travails. For us — a prosperous, unmolested people safely nuzzled in the arms of the word's last superpower (as of this writing, anyway) — this means Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust. The twin halves of broken matzoh will be infused with the spirit of the New Tribalism that is captivating young people across the Western world as an angry response to global homogenization. The first half will show the past travails of the Jewish people (a parallel series of walk-in closets will do the same for the Sevo), and the second half will show how easily we forget how much they hate us (ditto, Sevo). To be a bit reductive: first half, unpronounceable — Kristallnacht, Kindertransport, Kraków ghetto, Chernowitz, Wadowice, Drohobycz; second half, guilt inducing — towering videos of Jewish college boys at fraternity mixers hitting up demure Korean girls, while pretty suburban Jewish maideleh fetishize their urbanized African-American counterparts at a Smith Barney softball game. Subtext: six million died and you're twirling around a bar stool with some hazzar?
Holocaust for Kidz
Studies have shown that it's never too early to frighten a child with images of skeletal remains and naked women being chased by dogs across the Polish snow. Holocaust for Kidz will deliver a carefully tailored miasma of fear, rage, impotence, and guilt in children as young as ten. Through the magic of Animatronics, Claymation and Jurassic technology, the inane ramblings of underqualified American Hebrew day schools teachers on the subject of the Holocaust will be condensed into a concise forty-minute bloodbath. Young participants will leave feeling alienated and profoundly depressed, feelings that will be partly redeemed and partly thwarted by the ice-cream truck awaiting them at the end of the exhibit.
The "Think It Can't Happen Again?" Annex
Yeah, you think so? Well, think again, friend. This daring conceptual space will feature dozens of French Arab youths throwing rocks at passing museumgoers, threatening, "six million more," while passive French intellectuals stand by in the shadows, smoking and drinking, smoking and drinking. For safety reasons, the "rocks" will be made of 100 percent recyclable paper and the French Arab youths will be caged.
The Titanium-Clad Lamb Shank
We end the museum on a high note, celebrating the achievements of cutting-edge American Jews through life-affirming exhibits such as "David Copperfield: The Myth and the Magic" and "Onwards and Sideward: The Death of Literature and the Birth of the Sitcom." A room or two can be devoted to Israeli cultural achievements. Or not.
The Tent of Consent
This is where it all comes together, where Continuity gets its capital "C." Upon entering the Tent of Consent and submitting a blood sample and credit check, Jews of reproductive age (thirty-four to fifty-one) will show Hitler and his goons just where they can stick their Final Solution. Here, the word "no" is not an option. Here there is no diaphragm. Note: Tent should be rugged and green to denote summertime reproduction. No circus tents! This is serious business.
And Now a Word From Our Sponsor…
As an opportunity to reach out to the true hellmouth of American political power, evangelical Christians will be given their own (much smaller) tent from which they can proselytize to reproductive Jews emerging all sweaty and wobbly from the Tent of Consent. We estimate only 1 to 2 percent of our most expendable stock will actually fall for this crude goyishe siren song. A small price to pay, and our lobbyists will thank us.
Outcomes — First Year of Operation
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Two hundred thousand Jews will sow an additional one hundred thousand Jews on the shores of the Caspian Sea.
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Two to four thousand lackluster Jews will become born-again Mormons (or whatever the hell) and will stop pulling the rest of us down.
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Twenty thousand Jewish children will learn that it's somehow their fault.
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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
