Author: Cuberis

Ilana M. Horwitz, Ph.D., (Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology, and the Fields-Rayant Chair of Contemporary Jewish Life at the Stuart and Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience at Tulane University.

About a month ago, Ilana Horwitz, a Jewish studies professor at Tulane University, joined a synagogue for the first time in eight years.

The majority of children born in the developed world now have a good chance of making it to their 100th birthday. They are also on track to live, learn, work and retire in systems and institutions that were set up when their grandparents were children.

Ilana M. Horwitz’s new book focuses on the one in four American high school students who are “raised with religious restraint”—they orient their lives around God and try to behave in ways that they believe will please God. Her book is based on 10 years of survey data and 200 interviews.

What kind of child does well in school? The answer is hardly surprising: one who has respect for authority, an ability to get along with fellow students, a stable family, exposure to responsible adults and a feeling of hope. These days, in the U.S., such characteristics are more often found among middle- and upper-class children than among less-well-off students. What if there were one particular element in a child’s experience that could foster such characteristics in everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status?

For highly religious teens, being faithful involves more than praying often and attending church. It also entails being a good person and honoring God in all that you do.

“If you believe that God is watching you and evaluating whether you go to heaven, you’re going to try to be a conscientious, cooperative kid in all domains of your life,” said Ilana Horwitz, author of the new book, “God, Grades and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success.”

I’m finding that one of the benefits of being retired (or, as I call myself “unretired,” because I’m a freelance writer and editor in retirement), is the free time I now have to go back to school and learn. It’s fun, good for my brain, offers a sense of purpose and keeps me busy.

Girls raised by Jewish parents are more likely to graduate college, according to a new academic sociology study published by the American Sociological Review.

The survey data reveal that girls with a Jewish upbringing have two distinct post-secondary patterns compared to girls with a non-Jewish upbringing, even after controlling for social origins: They are 23 percentage points more likely to graduate from college, and the colleges they graduate from are much more selective.

A new study shows that young women with a Jewish upbringing are 23 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than non-Jewish young women of similar socioeconomic status. Jewish women also attend more selective universities than women from other religions in the United States.

In her new book, “God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success,” sociologist Ilana Horwitz examines the ways a religious upbringing shape the academic lives of teens. In one important finding, the subject of her recent op-ed in the New York Times, she found that working-class teenage boys raised in strongly religious homes were twice as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees than boys who were not.

If a Supreme Court justice, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and the secretary of the Treasury were not enough, Jewish girls can find plenty of other role models of professional success.

With the Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, college students in large swaths of the country are likely to lose access to abortion in their states. A draft of an opinion leaked earlier this month suggested that a majority of justices support the move to strike down the legal precedent that established abortion access as a constitutional right (along with Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 precedent that upheld Roe). Doing so would pave the way for roughly half of all states to outlaw the procedure.