Teachers who understand their students' cultural backgrounds will be more effective, according to South Carolina State University Education Department Chair Dr. Evelyn Fields, who is helping educators create lesson plans that engage students of all backgrounds. Read more here.

The Dave and Ceil Pavlovsky Endowment Fund for Jewish Education of the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County, South River, in partnership with the Foundation for Jewish Camp, has announced 50 $1,000 campership grants are available to Middlesex County children that are first-time attendees of overnight Jewish camps. Read more here.

Rabbi Tzvi Yosef Kotlarsky, a Polish-born who escaped war-torn Europe via Japan and China to ultimately participating in the building of the Chabad-Lubavitch school systems in Montreal and Brooklyn, N.Y., passed away Monday at the age of 91. Read more here.

Rabbi Daniel Lehmann, the new president of Hebrew College, envisions programs from education for people in retirement, to implementing the arts in Jewish education for youth. Read more here.

Graphic novel on the history of Israel used in classrooms. Read more here.

From Dec. 25-28, more than 550 Jewish food activists, farmers, educators, politicos, rabbis and just plain folk met in this sleepy central California beach town to learn about Torah and composting, and to take the Jewish food movement to the next level. Read more here.

Ruth Ellen Gruber uses Facebook to see how Jews, or at least Jews I know, define themselves in terms of religious identity. Read more here.

The Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernard Madoff is the latest in a string of financial blows to Jewish aid programs in the former Soviet Union, wiping out a major foundation that was the primary funder of Jewish higher education in Russia. Read more here.

On December 17 Spain became a full member of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (ITF). Read more here.

Pajamas, Jewish kids' books and cuddle-up time with a loving grown up are at the heart of a new program called "PJ Library." Focused on strengthening Jewish identity, the program sends free Jewish children's books or music, plus a parenting guide, monthly to families of children ranging from six months to five years old. Read more here.