Education & Culture

Stefanie Halpern has one of the neatest jobs in the world. Halpern, 40, is the director of collections for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, where over 24 million pieces of Jewish history reside. The Institute was founded in 1925 in Vilna (then in Poland, today Vilnius, Lithuania) and relocated to New York in 1940.

Earlier this year, three classrooms at Hillel Academy were transformed into an exhibition about the Holocaust. The project was conceived by 7th-grade teacher Sara Halpern and executed by the middle school students of the school’s girls’ division.

It is difficult to imagine that something positive could have come out of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey in Houston in 2017. But, indeed, there was a silver lining, and Joshua Furman, the new director of the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society, was at the center of it.

Paulette Yousefzadeh Greenfield remembers, almost too well, the afternoon of April 24, 2024. She received a text from her son Shai Greenfield, then a seventh-grader at Campus Middle School. “It said,” she recalled, “‘Mom, you’ll never guess who they picked for Arab American Heritage Month.’”

For most young Israelis, the post-high school years go like this: two years of compulsory military service, followed by a gap year of traveling, then off to university, trade school or the workforce. On Oct. 7, many university students found themselves back in the military as reservists were called into service as Israel went to war for its survival against Hamas.

After more than a quarter century of restless but patient roaming through several Denver locations, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop finally moved into a permanent home, a spacious, attractive and custom-designed facility in Denver’s rapidly redeveloping Clayton neighborhood.

In the wake of President Biden’s push for a free universal pre-kindergarten program, some states have been scrambling to implement systems that allow three and four-year-olds a seat in schools. Colorado is one of those states. 

As Jewish students head back to their university campus, or perhaps their first foray into the collegiate world, they might well enter an environment in which the very idea of Israel is likely to be criticized and savaged, delegitimized and sanctioned.

The Rabbi Replies speaks with Rabbi Avraham Mintz of Chabad of South Metro Denver in Lone Tree. “We’re not there to step on each other. We’re there to grow together. That’s how redemption comes.”

“Sounds Jewish” is a nationally distributed radio show that offers a weekly dive into the variety of ways in which Jewish life, culture and religion are expressed through music.