Leave it to Team Chosen to pitch a curveball at the wall that separates church and state. There's a new public school in Florida called Ben Gamla. It's a Hebrew charter school, which means Floridian tax dollars pay for it and it technically can't teach religion to its students, who technically don't have to be Jewish to enroll.
About 400 students started classes at Ben Gamla this week amid caustic debate over whether a public school can teach Hebrew without touching Judaism and the unconstitutional side of the church-state divide. The conflict intensified Wednesday, when the Broward County School Board ordered Ben Gamla to suspend Hebrew lessons because its curriculum — the third proposed by the school — referred to a Web site that mentioned religion.
Opponents say that it is impossible to teach Hebrew — and aspects of Jewish culture — outside a religious context, and that Ben Gamla, billed as the nation’s first Hebrew-English charter school, violates one of its paramount legal and political boundaries.
I hope the school gets sued because I have a few friends who need new material for Law Review. At some point practical considerations intrude upon the most dogmatic adherence to the church-state divide, don't they? A school in the wondrously named city of Hollywood, Florida has Hebrew as a foreign language requirement and must now vet every textbook for eyebrow-raising allusions to shofars, red heifers, or mezzuzot. Can the kids at least get sour cream with their spaghetti in the cafeteria?
Frankly, I never minded reading about religion in my public high school: We were taught the Bible as it was written, as fiction. No one freaked. And even Latin instruction couldn't wend its way completely around mention of Zeus, the pantheon or the oracle at Delphi. Learning a dead language means learning about the people who spoke it and where they thought lightning and floods came from. (All right, Hebrew isn't "dead." But that Rome today is the homeland of a Catholic mini-theocracy instead of a sexually permissive republic with George Clooney haircuts bums you, me and Edward Gibbon to no end.)
If the modern world weren't filled with such pea-brained and pedantic Pecksniffs, we might watch comfortably as a handful of black Pentecostalists at Ben Gamla got to scan, in the original, a bit of antique folklore known as the Torah.
James Baldwin would have been cool with that.
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