What the New York Times' Story On Chasidic Schools Misses jewishlink.news - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jewishlink.news Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
We can’t let our fear or ideology keep us from confronting the difficult issues raised by so many of our young. But, by the same token, they must listen as well.
By Pearl Markovitz | December 31, 2020
On Saturday night, January 2, at 8:30 p.m., the community is invited to participate in a presentation by Dr. Eve Krakowski, assistant professor of history at Princeton University specializing in the social history of Jews in the medieval period. Through Princeton’s extensive collections as well as collections worldwide at universities and museums, Krakowski has created a vivid picture of everyday life in the Middle East during Medieval times. These collections of letters, legal documents, shopping lists and all types of everyday communication create a fascinating and elucidating picture of the daily life of both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. The famous Cairo Geniza, which Krakowski has researched extensively, which was discarded in Cairo and re-discovered in the 19th century, contains within it high texts as well as straightforward practical documents which provide insight into the intersection of the everyday lives of the elite and the simple populace. At her upcoming presentation entitled “Maimonides and the Miqveh in Egypt,” Krakowski will be focusing upon a particular edict issued by the Rambam that sparked widespread controversy and was followed by serious ramifications for a long time afterwards.
The Social Order
In late 2014, I met with Naftuli Moster, a bright and charismatic graduate student at Hunter College who grew up in Brooklyn’s Hasidic community. He was interested in studying Hasidic parents’ attitudes toward secular (nonreligious) education—an area that I have long researched and written about.
I gave him the best guidance I could: how to write a survey, how to get buy-in from the community, whether to use Yiddish or English, and how to ensure that his sample was as representative as possible.
I eventually realized that his aim was not data collection. A month later, the