Rapper Finds Order in Orthodox Judaism in Israel

NYTimes

The tall man in the velvet fedora and knee-length black jacket with ritual fringes peeking out takes long, swift strides toward the Western Wall. It’s late in the day, and he does not want to miss afternoon prayers at Judaism’s holiest site.

“We have to get there before the sun goes down,” he says, his stare fixed behind a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, the first clue that this is no ordinary Jerusalem man of God. It’s the rapper Shyne, the Sean Combs protégé who served almost nine years in New York prisons for opening fire in a nightclub in 1999 during an evening out with Mr. Combs and his girlfriend at the time, Jennifer Lopez. [...]

Pledge to Give Away half of fortunes Stirs Debate

NYTimes

WITHOUT a doubt, the biggest event in philanthropy this year was the Giving Pledge, a commitment by 40 of the wealthiest Americans to give away at least half of their fortunes, about $600 billion.

The goals of the pledge, which was organized by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren E. Buffett, were to stimulate discussion about philanthropy among the ultrawealthy and unleash a wave of me-tooism among others that would bring about “the Second Great Wave of Philanthropy,” in the words of Sean Stannard-Stockton, a blogger and philanthropic consultant.

Now, about three months later, the pledge has not yet visibly inspired new major gifts or attracted additional signatures — Mr. Buffett said he expected more soon — but has surely created discussion and debate, about the wealthy, their giving and what it says about our society. [...]

PTSD - playing Tetris might protect against stress syndrome

CNN

The rapid-fire visual puzzles that make Tetris so engrossing may also make the video game a promising treatment for post-traumatic stress, a new study suggests.

Recurring, intrusive thoughts of a traumatic event (or events) are one of the hallmark symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a type of anxiety disorder. According to the study, which appears in the journal PLoS ONE, playing Tetris soon after a traumatic experience appears to protect against these flashbacks, by distracting the brain from the event and short-circuiting how upsetting memories and images are stored.

Not just any video game will do. Notably, the study found that games that rely on trivia or language skills don't appear to have the same therapeutic effect as stacking Tetris blocks, probably because they activate different areas of the brain.[...]

American "Terrorist" in Peru

Time Magazine

Lori Berenson, the American woman arrested on terrorism charges in Peru 15 years ago, should be happy. A judge accepted her petition for parole late last week and she was released from prison early Monday evening. She is living in a rented apartment in Miraflores, an upscale apartment in Lima, Peru's capital, has her 18-month-old son, Salvador, by her side, and her mother is in town from New York to help her settle in.[...]

Hush: A new young-adult novel tackles sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world

Tablet

Hush, a young adult novel by the pseudonymous Eishes Chayil (the pen name is a Yiddish-inflected version of eishet chayil, which means “a woman of valor”), received starred reviews from the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books and the notoriously hard-to-please Kirkus Reviews. Booklist called it a “stunning debut” and “powerful stuff.” School Library Journal called it “thoughtful, disturbing and insightful.”

So, why hadn’t I heard of it?

A librarian who reads Tablet Magazine alerted me to its existence, saying she hadn’t seen anything about it in the Jewish press. Indeed, a Google search finds only a snotty thread (based on Amazon’s description rather than on the book itself) on an ultra-Orthodox-run discussion board called Hashkafah, and a rave review on the blog The Velveteen Rabbi (written by a female rabbinical student in the Jewish Renewal tradition). That’s it.[...]

Buy Child & Domestic Abuse Volume I & II directly from Amazon

Buy Child & Domestic Abuse book directly from Amazon

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Teacher evaluation controversy

New York Times

Colleagues of Rigoberto Ruelas were alarmed when he failed to show up for work one day in September. They described him as a devoted teacher who tutored students before school, stayed with them after and, on weekends, took students from his South Los Angeles elementary school to the beach.

When his body was found in a ravine in the Angeles National Forest, and the coroner ruled it a suicide, Mr. Ruelas’s death became a flash point, drawing the city’s largest newspaper into the middle of the debate over reforming the nation’s second-largest school district.
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When The Los Angeles Times released a database of “value-added analysis” of every teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District in August, Mr. Ruelas was rated “less effective than average.” Colleagues said he became noticeably depressed, and family members have guessed that the rating contributed to his death.

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Daas Torah Blog

R' Shmuely Boteach claims: Chabad is Judaism

JPost

[...] WITNESSING THE fulfillment of that promise at the conference was an awakening. Chabad is no longer merely a Jewish movement. It is Judaism. I find it astonishing that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu flew in to attend the Jewish federations’ annual General Assembly but bypassed the Chabad conference. If an Israeli prime minister wants to be part of the unfolding of modern Jewish history, he has to address Chabad. No other organization even comes close to its global reach or grassroots impact. And it is growing exponentially.[...]

Outrageous revisionism:UN declares Rachel's Tomb - a mosque

JPost

On October 21, UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) declared that Rachel’s Tomb near Jerusalem is the Bilal ibn Rabah mosque – endorsing a Palestinian claim that first surfaced only in 1996 and which ignores centuries of Muslim tradition.

In a series of decisions condemning Israel, the UNESCO board called upon the government to rescind its decision in February to include Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on Israel’s official list of national heritage sites. The sharp protests by Ambassador to UNESCO Nimrod Barkan to the UN body’s decision were expunged from the record by the chairman of the session, the Russian representative, on the pretext that they were too aggressive.

A scrupulous examination of testimonies and historical sources demonstrates that defining Rachel’s Tomb as a mosque does an injustice to facts and traditions anchored in both Muslim documents and Jewish sources, and constitutes distortion, bias and deception. As opposed to the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs, which also serve as the location of mosques, Rachel’s Tomb never served as a mosque for the Muslims. The Muslim connection to the site derives from its relation to Rachel and has no connection to Bilal ibn Rabah, Muhammad’s first muezzin.

Kindness of a Stranger That Still Resonates

New York Times

The event was a reunion for people who were never supposed to meet, commemorating an act of charity that succeeded because it happened in secret.

Helen Palm sat in her wheelchair on the stage of the Palace Theater and read her plea for help, the one she wrote in the depths of the Great Depression to an anonymous stranger who called himself B. Virdot.

“I am writing this because I need clothing,” Ms. Palm, 90, read aloud on Friday evening. “And sometimes we run out of food.”

Ms. Palm was one of hundreds who responded to an advertisement that appeared Dec. 17, 1933, in The Canton Repository newspaper. A donor using the pseudonym B. Virdot offered modest cash gifts to families in need. His only request: Letters from the struggling people describing their financial troubles and how they hoped to spend the money. The donor promised to keep letter writers’ identities secret “until the very end.” [...]

Gender identity:New crises on college campus

CNN

When Kevin Murphy entered as a freshman at Mount Holyoke, a Massachusetts women's college, in 2003, he was female. By the time he received his diploma, he was male.

Phillip Hudson, who attended Morehouse, an all-male historically black college in Georgia, calls himself androgynous, meaning he doesn't identify with masculine or feminine identity norms.
The two men represent a debate that is brewing at some of the nation's same-sex colleges. For these colleges, which have historically defied boundaries and challenged the status quo, a new test of tolerance has surfaced: How are they handling gender identity?

Defining gender on same-sex campuses has become murky as some students say they fall outside the conventional male-female gender binary. More schools are encountering complicated cases where not all students at men's colleges identify as male and not all students at women's colleges identify as female. [...]