the observerVoice of the Students

MOST JCHS STUDENTS PREFER FINALS TO BE HELD BEFORE BREAK

By Elijah Jatovsky

Last year the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) decided to move first semester final exams to before winter break. Ra-chel Norton, an SFUSD Com-missioner, said that the change was made because many of the SFUSD’s 55,000 students take classes concurrently at City Col-lege so the change was made to synchronize the district’s schedul-ing with City College’s. She further explained that, “students felt they would be better prepared for their exams before winter break than after.” An FAQ released by the SFUSD stated that, “with final exams and papers completed prior to the winter break, our secondary students can truly rest without the pressure of finishing assignments or studying for tests and return re-freshed for the new semester.” First semester final exams at JCHS oc-cur after break due to scheduling issues among other factors. JCHS begins the school year later than schools that place finals before winter break, because it does not want to cut into the last few weeks of summer when many JCHS stu-dents are still traveling or at camp.

But in a hypothetical world where there was a choice of hav-ing finals before or after break, what would be the right decision? A survey of 79 JCHS students found that 43 percent preferred finals as they are now, after break, while 57 percent said they would like them before winter break.

The general consensus derived from the comments of students in favor of finals after break was that while studying and the relentless knowledge of upcoming finals de-tracted from the overall relaxation of break and the two-week break provided a much needed time for studying. As one student wrote, “finals after break makes your break worse, but will probably make you do better on your finals since you will have more time to study.”

Students preferring finals be-fore break explained that winter break should be just that. “It’s called winter BREAK. The op-erative word is break. We students humbly request a BREAK, not a two-week long study hall...” wrote a disgruntled student on the survey.

From the point of view of

WednesdayJanuary 12, 2011

Volume 2Issue 4

“Yallah”- A quick look at the news -

Moodle Crash Fault of Technology That Was Not Fully Integrated

By Micah Fenner

On December 3, something went awry in the little-visited server room behind the office of IT Associ-ate Josh Goffstein. The information that was conveyed to Mr. Leon-ard Stern, who is the front end of Moodle for the faculty and students was that, “I was told it was a hard-ware malfunction. The server that [Moodle] was on crashed.” How-ever, most students were not aware of this information. Moodle had ex-perienced several temporary outag-es before and this was just assumed by most to be an extended outage.

This change was not as much of

a problem for many as it may have seemed. Jake Rosenberg (’14) said that, “It was better for classes. It made teachers give clearer instruc-tions and let us ask about homework at a time when they could answer us.” Others were just not affected, such as Ari Goldberg-Safir (’13) who said that he noticed only ap-proximately one-third of his teach-ers using Moodle. He hoped that as a result of the outage he would “see teachers have a renewed will-ingness to use [Moodle].” Maddy Zacks (’11) saw the unavailabil-ity of Moodle as an annoyance. “When the server crashed, I wasted a lot of time going to my teachers to

WeatherHi: 59˚ Lo: 47˚San Francisco: More clouds than sun. Highs in the mid 50s Oakland: Considerable cloudiness. Highs in the mid 50s and lows in the low 50s. Marin: Same as Oakland. Peninsula: Mostly cloudy. Highs in the upper 50s and lows in the upper 40s.Source: The Weather Channel

- “Newsbite” announces a new school dance in the works.[A3]

- Seagulls take over the courtyard following lunch. [A2]

- Senior Ami Wulf writes about Keystone, college applications and the pressures of senior year. [A3]

- Sam Seder gives a lens into the world of a rower on a nation-ally ranked crew team. [A2]

- Wikileaks raises ques-tions about free speech, the right to privacy, and legal rights in the digital era. [B1]

- Opinion: An argument against Freudian Pys-chology by David Con-neran. [A3]

- Bad weather devas-tates El Salvador. [B1]

- Finding inspiration in Panama over winter break. [B2]

- China is manipulat-ing their currency, see how they’re doing it and why it matters [B1]

+ much more

The W.T.F. is WikiLeaks’ Problem

ColumnsWorldOpinion

Where are Obama’s Principles?

Inside One of America’s Top Crew Teams

get hard copies of all the worksheets and assignments,” Zacks said.

Students were not the only ones affected by the outage. Mr. Iggy Gurin-Malous had entered all of the quizzes for his Comparative Religion class into Moodle and when it crashed, he lost everything. Ms. Rae Goodman had assigned a project for her biology class that was to be turned in on Moodle the day of the failure, and extra work was required for her to collect it. Although Moodle initially experi-enced a bumpy start, it was soon relied upon and utilized by many

Continued on A2

Students React to JCHS’

Disciplinary Actions

By Shai Tabb

Many students wonder, when there is gossip or a rumor about students being disciplined by the school, what really goes on behind closed doors. Students wonder about the disciplinary actions that the school takes in the aims of mak-ing our community a stronger one.

Not everyone thinks the school’s actions are always the right ones though, which sometimes happens when students do not understand the full situation; some disagree with the actions taken against students who may have wronged. The students and parents interviewed for this ar-ticle, that requested it were granted anonymity due to the sensitive na-ture of the subject and the potential for repercussions resulting from their being interviewed for this article.

One sophomore said, “I don’t necessarily agree with what the school does, but I think it depends on the case. Personally, I’ve never had to go through the [disciplinary] process… so I don’t know if it’s comfortable for the students or not. I just think some of the things the school does to pun-ish [are] harsh.” Another student countered that, saying, “what they’re doing to the students isn’t just for the student who got in trouble to learn what they’ve done wrong, but to set an

Continued on A3

Paul Simon: Still Got it After All These Years

The Musical Great’s Newest Studio Album

Retains His Voice Through His Signature

Sound and Depth of Content

Paul Simon, the guitarist of the famous 60’s folk group

Simon and Garfunkel, is scheduled to release his 12th studio album in April 2011.

Avrumy Reissberg

Music

Review

This is an exciting release to look forward to for all music appreciators, especially Paul Simon fans.

Unlike Graceland, an album that was inspired by South African township music that helped fuel the anti-apartheid movement, So Beautiful or So

What is a work that Simon de-scribes as a more melodic and harmonic sounding record, yet still possessing the social-po-

litical commentary of his other more upbeat and percussive albums. He writes about several issues rather unrelated to each other, which probably has to do with the fact that Simon does not set out to create a specific message, as he puts it, “it just comes out that way.”

One of the tracks, “Ques-tions for the Angels,” a song about people searching for meaning in a confused world, mentions Jay-Z the hip hop art-ist. He alsodwells on a few war related issues including a neph-ew serving in Iraq, a Vietnam veteran who deals with post war life, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, which is not war related but holds a similar impact when heard in a song. Simon spent over a year on some of the songs writing, crafting them to his liking, in a small cottage near his home in Connecticut. Simon still utilizes

Some Students Find System “Harsh,” Others See it as

Essential

Continued on A2

Continued on A2

Wikipedia

The ObserverWednesday, January 12, 2011 A2

Tens of Seagulls Flock to Courtyard, Eat Students’ Leftovers

By Evan Fenner

Many may wonder why after the end of lunch a giant swarm of birds de-scends on the courtyard. Office Man-ager David Joseph said that they come because of the food. “People put their lunch trash in the trashcan[s] outside, and the seagulls go for it.” The trash-cans are not the only problem though. Mr. Joseph explained that people tend to leave lunch trays and food outside after lunch, which attracts the seagulls as well. This is not a new problem. JCHS alumnus Josh Steinberger re-membered them, and said that, “liter-ally every single day they were there,” and that even though the bushes were a tripping hazard, the seagulls were worse. “You run into a bush... and the seagulls just laugh at you.”

Many people are unaware of the problem, responding with “What?” or “Seagulls?” or “I never noticed,” when asked about it. However the problem still exists. Mr. Joseph sug-gests students bring their food trash from outside to the proper indoor trashcans. He said, “it’s not that peo-ple shouldn’t eat outside, people just need to take care better of their space.”

Last Tuesday a segul actually made it all the way into the commons according to Mr. Joseph. Birds inside of buildings can pose various problems for maintenance staff so that incident certainly underscored the urgency for students to stop leaving out food.

Life on a Competitive Crew Team

Sam Seder

Rowing in

Marin

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines rowing as: the propelling of a boat by means of oars: the action of one that rows or the sport of racing shells (boats). For me,

rowing is far more intense and time consuming than this definition suggests. In row-

ing, there are two different seasons. The fall season includes 5000 meter “Time Trial” races, while the spring season comprises 2000 meter “Sprint” races. Competitive rowers generally train ten months per year, 30-40 hours per week, and gear all their hard work toward a single six minute race at the national cham-pionships. The Marin Rowing Association is the club that I have been fortunate enough to train and compete with for the last three years. I have been on the Varsity Squad for the past two years, where I have competed in races across the country against teams from all around the world. Last year, our boat had a strong end to the season with a silver medal at the National Championships in Cincinnati, OH, and this year we hope to go back and build on last year’s success and take the title! [Anyone interested in rowing or in buying JCHS Crew apparel should find me at the PB&J Table at lunch].

A day in the life of a rower:

4:00am: Wake up in the dark. Pull on thermals.

4:30am: Eat breakfast including protein shake. Traffic lights aren’t even working yet.

5:00am: Arrive at boathouse.

5:15am: Warm up and launch the boat - Row into the bay past San Quentin inmates cheering and hitting pots and pans against metal fence.

7:00 am: Practice ends. Rehydrate.

7:15 am: Eat second breakfast. Rush to pick up car pool.

8:15 am School begins ...

Lunch: Eat three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole wheat bread while in line at the salad bar. Stop eating when 8,000 calories have been consumed.

4:00: Afternoon practice includes cross-fit training, weight lifting and yoga.

5:00: Row on water: practice tech-nique and build endurance.

6:45: First dinner

8:00: Second dinner

11:00: Set alarm for 4 a.m. Fall asleep before head hits pillow.

the JCHS administration, Reg-istrar Alexis Wright explained that it is all about balance. If the administration saw that there

was a significantly greater benefit to the school in having finals before break, they would switch the policy.

Ms. Wright said the most incon-venient aspect for the administration of having finals after break has to do with colleges. Colleges are ready to start reviewing senior applica-tions before JCHS goes on break. To not have first semester grades until the second week of January is tough on the administration because of the rush to send the grades off to colleges that have been waiting for a month to receive them. “It’s a little dangerous territory to… go on break for two weeks and then come back and be focused and… ready to take finals [on] material that you had before break. It’s also nice to just wrap up something and then go on break.” Ms. Wright said.

MIT alumnus and current mathematics teacher at Balboa High School, Michael Ferraro, of-fered a teacher’s perspective after having recently experienced the

FinalsContinued from A1 school district’s switch in policy. “I

prefer this schedule to what it was in years past since it was always dif-ficult to get classes back on track and ready for final exams after hav-ing a multi-week break.” However, he continued, “…this year seemed more stressful for teachers leading up to final exams. The lead-up to the holiday season is busy for a lot of people, and writing, proofing [and] evaluating exams during that time seemed harder than in the past. The true test will be how things flow next year after we’ve already done one year with this new schedule.”

But the finals schedule does not necessarily need to be so black and white. Ms. Wright explained that JCHS used to conduct finals in a different fashion. Finals would be-gin the Friday after winter break and roll over into the next week. This meant there was one or two days of rest/study time between each final, but the old system also cut short the “review week” by one day. Ms. Wright believed that in a “hypothet-ical world, if finals were ever moved to be before break… [this system] would alleviate some of the stress of having finals right before break.”

Of the JCHS students surveyed, 14% more students preferred to have finals before break than after.

teachers. However, after the crash, the question has become whether its lack of reliability is a cause for worry.

The Observer was able to get an interview with IT Director Tony Gruen, though much of it was un-able to be published. The story begins in 2009, when JCHS made the decision to start using a dif-ferent underlying database which meant they would no longer be using NetClassroom. Aside from switching databases, NetClass-room had other problems that the administration felt warranted a new system. Although it was loved by students as a way to access both assignments and grades, it was ex-ceedingly complicated to retrieve information from the database.

While the school was search-ing for a new service to use, Public Folders was utilized, but was an unwieldy system that could not do everything the faculty had hoped it would do. Moodle is a free and open source, which means that any-one can be a part of the develop-ment team. Because Moodle and NetClassroom were both primar-ily ways for the teachers to com-municate with students, the deci-sion on what program to use was considered an academic decision.

Mr. Gruen purchased two brand new hard drives from Seagate which were rated to last for four million hours. When the crash occurred, they had been running for just a little more than 3,000 hours. He said that the sys-

tem was “ultra-low risk” and there was no reason for it to have failed. The chances that it was going to crash were so low that Mr. Gruen said he would have put his personal banking and financial information on the drive. “It’s just bonkers,” he said, adding that it was like “an asteroid hitting the parking lot.”

Unfortunately, because Moodle was only capable of backing up to the drive that it was stored on, when it crashed, everything was lost. Not even the professional data recovery company, which JCHS sent the drive to, could get any of the infor-mation off of the drive. This meant teachers had to re-upload all of their course material once the sys-tem came back up. Head of School Rabbi Howard Ruben understood the frustration that this might have caused, saying that duplicating work is something that should always be avoided. However, he felt as though in terms of JCHS’ new utilization of technology this year, the Moo-

MoodleContinued from A1

intricate guitar chords that create textures of sound which are simply unique to his style of playing. His voice, still supple, yet gentle and soothing, does not sound like it has changed at all since he was a young musi-cian. How does he maintain such a voice at the age of 69? Quitting smoking and drinking certainly helped, but it is also evident that he is a hard worker when it comes to his music. It is no question that he poured endless hours of tinkering into this album but he was not alone in the effort either.

Phil Ramone, who pro-duced many of Simon’s seven-ties records, including Paul

Simon, There Goes Rhymin’

Simon, and Still Crazy After

All These Years, co-produced So Beautiful or So What. The two arranged for Simon’s wife and daughter to record har-monies on some of the tracks. Bob Dylan is even said to be

featured on one of the songs. What’s interesting is Simon’s apparent connection with cer-tain popular indie rock acts of our time. Bands such as Griz-zly Bear, Spoon, and Vampire Weekend all appreciate Simon’s music even to the extent of re-cording their own covers of his songs. Chris Bear of Grizzly Bear recorded some drum parts for Simon’s new album. Simon may even consider himself a type of indie act. At the mature age of 69, he self finances his sessions at his home studio. Al-though very accomplished, he finds himself going back to his roots of songwriting for this new album. Simon’s appeal to the younger generation appears not to be short of outstanding, and this is not surprising consider-ing his socially conscious lyrics and upbeat attitude. Check out his newest single “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” which has already been released and is available on iTunes.

Paul SimonContinued from A1

dle crash was just a speedbump. Now that Moodle has been re-

stored to service, it has been given a dedicated server, for which Mr. Gruen has written special software so it can be backed up along with the school’s ten other servers. The other servers run JCHS email, account-ing software, the grade book soft-ware and the school’s telephones. Even if Moodle crashes again, its data will be recoverable from four different places. Hopefully teachers will not take the shutdown as a rea-son to be wary of the system. Jenny Klonoff (‘12) believes that because of the shut down, “teachers have been forced to rely on [Moodle] less and may lessen the way that it is used in the future.” Teachers and students alike should realize that Moodle is back and stronger than ever, and that there is less to worry about now than there was before.

It was hard drive manufactured by Seagate, like the one above, that failed, causing Moodle to crash.

Stock Photo/iS

tock

Photo

s

Discipline

The ObserverWednesday, January 12, 2011 A3

example for other students and create a really safe, nurturing environment, one without bullying or cheating.”

Of course students have a lot to say about how they think the school should operate, but so do the parents. One mother of a JCHS student said, “From a parent’s perspective, we are extremely pleased with the way we see the school handling disciplinary issues. It appears that much thought and con-sideration for both sides is taken into account. That judgment is rooted in ethics and great values.” Many par-ents had positive comments about how the school handles these situations.

A lot of students were apprehen-sive to talk about the issue, not just due to its sensitive nature, but because they themselves may have had to go through these tough conversations with the administration. One stu-dent said, “I have gotten in trouble at JCHS before, but because it was just me, and not a group, the punishment was done in silence, which I really ap-preciated.” She was obviously pleased with how her situation was dealt with, but went on to say, “when groups of kids do get in trouble, it is so public and... emails and letters embarrass not only the students that did wrong, but also the victims of their wrongdoings.”

A student who has gone through the school’s discipline process first

hand, as part of a larger group, senior Brody Paul, says that “emails… just cause additional drama and problems as well as inviting parents and the rest of the community to be part of an incident that should not be public.”

In the past, Head of School Rabbi Ruben has often stressed the importance of making the nec-essary healing that follows acts of behavior resulting in discipline, an essential communal process.

Sophomore Ari Goldberg-Safir echoed complaints of other students when he said that his impression was that the school has been “generally harsh” when it came to disciplining

Hell Part 1:

Ami Wulf

Dispatches

From Senior

Year

Joint JCHS/Kehillah Dance Planned:

Newsbite

Knesset Executive for Student Life Micah Fenner (‘12) announced that he is organizing a dance with Kehillah Jewish High School to occur sometime within the coming months. The dance would occur at a location some-where geographically in between JCHS and Kehillah. Plans are ten-tative, as a location still needs to be found and final details need to be ironed out with Kehillah. Students have expressed interest in having a joint dance. Fenner intends to keep the student body in-formed as plans progress.For more info:

mfenner@jchsofthebay.org

Take a few ‘JCHS strolls’ around the school and chances are you’ll hear juniors complaining about how their lives are filled with work. This may be true, but few students seem to under-stand that junior year is not to be as feared as senior year. Not even close.

Senior Noah Goldstein expressed

the thoughts of many in his grade when he stated that senior year “was the equivalent of junior year with

academics but on top of that we have college apps and Keystone.” Because incoming seniors think they’ll be able to relax during the year, it comes as a great shock to find their expecta-tions shattered. Even senior Sophia Wilkof, who was warned as a junior of the academic rigor to come, said that “I had no idea it was going to be this tough!” The ever eloquent Martin “Baj” Stillman said that Keystone and Senior Thesis, when placed on top of college applications and an enormous amount of class work, was “so un-dude,” and pointed out the abnormality of JCHS’ large number of graduation requirements.

The grievances of the ever-complaining class of 2011 shouldn’t be taken lightly. As Wilkof points out, “there’s no regard for the fact that we have to plan our futures right now.” In many ways, Wilkof, a high-ranking member of Knesset, is correct. Col-

Life, The Universe and Everything/Talia Beck

Freudian psychology: a term that everyone at

this school knows with at least a passing familiarity. But why? What benefit is there to study-ing a sometimes baseless theory and pretending that psychology stopped changing after Freud and his student Jung died? None. While the pseudo-aca-demic field of literary criticism

may pretend that Freud was right about everything under the sun in order to reinterpret works of fiction, such an approach ignores the evolution psychology has gone through in the many decades since his death.

Nowadays, even psychoana-lytic therapy (formerly clas-sically Freudian) has changed, and many therapists use more evidence-based practices such as cognitive or behavioral therapy instead of psychoanalysis. In cases of severe depression, for example, cognitive therapy is usually recommended as the most effective treatment. In addition, medications such as antipsychotics and antidepres-sants address the biological side

of mental health in ways that “talk” therapy cannot. Limiting our understanding of psychol-ogy to Freud and neo-Freudians needlessly misinforms us about the mind and the field of psy-chology.

While psychologists today frequently disagree, there is some consensus among them. Schemas, which are categories that the mind sorts informa-tion into, are among some of the universally accepted ideas in psychology that are non-Freudian. While some of his ideas such as the rationalization of actions have been accepted, Freud’s work as a whole is not as well regarded. To inform stu-dents that Freud’s work (and the work of neo-Freudians) is the sum of all psychology is beyond inaccurate; it’s dishonest and shameful. Such a notion should have no home at JCHS

- David Conneran (’11)

This is not a news article.

This is purely an opinion

piece reflecting the opinions of

the writer. Space constraints

sometimes neccesitate that The Observer place opinion pieces

on other pages.

Opinion: Just Say No to Freud!

Continued from A1

Sigmund Freud

lege applications are so squeezed in between JCHS-required work that it is hard to believe that teachers under-stand what the students are going through.

Perhaps the scariest part of the senior equation is that the year isn’t even half complete – and it won’t be getting any easier. Ariel Platt, who graduated from JCHS in 2008, claims that second semester senior year is even harder than first semes-ter because of “the combination of Senior Thesis and Keystone.” Platt’s views aren’t far-fetched; in the 2009 yearbook, one “You know you go to JCHS when…” was “The hardest part of your academic career is second semester senior year.”

In this author’s opinion, the most surprising thing is the lack of an insurrection in his grade. Maybe the class of 2011 feels so close to graduation that we don’t see any point in complaining, or maybe somewhere deep-down we recognize that the extraordinary amount of work we are assigned may help us deal with whatever college may throw at us, a fact wholeheartedly supported by Platt. The best we can do for now is to warn younger students of what’s to come, and to prepare ourselves for the semester from Hell, part II.

students. “But without having full information I cannot say,” he said. “I don’t know the full story on any of the disciplinary actions JCHS has taken, so I cannot give you a fair quote.” Goldberg-Safir then qualified his statement further, possibly getting at one of the hardest things for students to do when it comes to evaluating how the school handles behavioral is-sues: separating their own day-to-day forays into what they see as unfair discipline, with the underlying issues at stake when the school administra-tion is compelled to take serious ac-tion. “I was kicked out of Talmud today, so I’m pretty biased,” he said.

Illustration by The Observer

Max Halberstadt/Public Domain

This is not a news article. This is

purely an opinion piece reflecting the

opinions of the writer.

the observer

WorldWikiLeaks Raises Questions of Free Speech in the Digital Age

SummaryWikiLeaks.org has released

confidential documents from the United States govern-ment.

some have been eye-opening.

in America over whether Wikileaks’ release of the documents is protected as free speech or whether Assange should be arrested.

If you’ve been listening to the world lately, you have probably heard the term WikiLeaks or the name Ju-lian Assange. What is it? Who is he? Why is everybody so concerned?

Julian Paul Assange is an Austra-lian hacker and web activist. He had hacked into numerous institutions at a very young age and in 1992 was taken to court for unlawfully obtain-ing information from organizations as high up as a group in the Penta-gon. He pleaded guilty to 24 charges of hacking and was released for good behavior. In 2006, he founded a website called WikiLeaks.org.

WikiLeaks is classified as a whistleblower website. Wikileaks states its “primary interest is in ex-posing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations.”

People with official documents containing secretive information release or “leak” these documents by sending them to the website. The website then publishes these documents on its homepage or for-wards them on to a news source, all the while keeping secret the iden-tity of the person who gave them the documents in the first place.

The U.S. government and many other governments around the world have laws that can punish the release of classified government documents with jail sentences, but because the people at WikiLeaks are not the ones that are releasing the documents, merely publish-ing them, they are not legally liable.

WikiLeaks has had a short but drama-filled list of leaks in the past, including manuals for operating at the U.S. Guantanomo Bay deten-tion facility, documents pertaining to illegal activities of a Swiss bank in the Cayman Islands, and information from Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo account. What has lead to the re-cent surge of publicity for Wikileaks is the release of the U.S. govern-ment diplomatic cables. These cables are communications between 247 U.S. embassies around the world and the CIA. WikiLeaks released these documents to five major inter-national newspapers, including The

New York Times and The Guard-

ian. All of these documents can be read on their respective websites.

These cables, written in the pe-riod between December 28, 1966 to February 28, 2010, contain criticism and speculation on various interna-tional events and world leaders, ac-tions in the War on Terror and infor-mation about intelligence and counter intelligance actions the US has taken.

The published cables now num-

ber 220 out of the quarter of a mil-lion WikiLeaks says they have. They intended to release them in batches over the course of many months.

In response to speculated fed-eral and actual corporate censorship of the CIA cables, the internet ter-rorist/anarchist group Anonymous showed support of WikiLeaks by attacking and bringing down nu-merous websites, including the Swiss post office and banking companies, Mastercard and Visa.

By Jake Rosenberg

Wednesday, January 12, 2010

China’s Renminbi Manipulating the World

Obama mingles with foreign leaders at the G-20 Summit in Seoul, South Korea. Obama met with Chinese Premier Hu Jin-tao during the economic summit.

By Elijah Jatovsky

What would happen if the JCHS lunch program decided to expand to more schools? This could have more of an effect than one might think. To expand to more schools, the program would have to make more food. By mak-ing more food the program could make its food cheaper, which would make it more appealing to a greater amount of schools. Other

schools’ lunch programs would not want to be put out of business, so they would begin making more food to make their food cheaper as well. What would result would be a mass increase in food production by San Francisco lunch programs, which would create an excess amount of food and could bank-rupt some of the lunch programs.

This is in essence what the global currency war is. A currency war begins when a country starts a process called Quantitative Eas-ing (QE). QE is the process of a country deciding to print more money, which makes its products seem cheaper. A country will do this as an attempt to stimulate its economy. The reason commodities seem cheaper after QE is because, for example, when you own a $20 bill in America and America prints more money, your $20 bill now seems to be worth less because the bill is now less of the total sum. The reason it only seems to be worth less but in actuality is not, is because the $20 is still worth $20 after QE in the American market. However there are now simply a greater amount of them, which cre-ates the feeling of them being less “rare” and therefore less valuable.

JCHS alumnus and current Columbia University MBA grad-uate student Shmulick Fishman explained that QE has a large psychological effect on a country. “The psychology of [QE] is way more powerful [than the math] be-cause items start to feel cheaper.”

So what kind of effect does QE of one country have on a global scale? Earlier this year the United States’ Federal Reserve began printing more money in an attempt to stimulate the economy and decrease unemployment. When America dilutes her curren-cy by making more if it, America’s products, or “commodities,” seem less expensive, which attracts more

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” - Plato

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

Reactions around the world vary greatly. Some consider Julian Assange to be an anarchist who at-tacks diplomatic relations between countries. Others consider him a hero, likening the release of the CIA cables to that of Daniel Ellsberg’s 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “let’s be clear: This dis-closure is not just an attack on Amer-ica’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international commu-nity, the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity. Now, I’m aware that some may mistakenly applaud those responsible, so I want to set the record straight. There is nothing laudable about endangering innocent people, and there is nothing brave about sabotaging the peace-ful relations between nations.” After the release of these documents, the CIA created a Wikileaks Task Force, or W.T.F. No matter how one feels about the whole matter, the W.T.F is sure to be a problem for WikiLeaks.

Bad Weather Conditions Wreak Havoc in El Salvador

By Aviva Herr-Welber

The main map shows the location of El Salvador in Central America, and in the world as a whole.

Over the recent winter break, you probably ate a lot. Whether it was hot chocolate or fish and chips or you name it, someone in our school prob-ably ate it. A big part of spending time with our families often includes enjoy-ing special foods, and it’s something we do every year.

Yet there are many families who can’t afford to share large, festive meals with those they care about, and might not even know if they’ll be able to eat at all. This is currently the case for many poverty-stricken families in rural El Salvador, and a recent weather crisis in their area has made the condi-tion even more deplorable than before.

For these families in remote areas, meals are a far cry from the supermar-ket luxuries that are the status quo for

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Tikkun

so many of us. The majority of male Salvadoran citizens in rural places are farmers that work almost every day of the year, twelve to fourteen hours a day, to grow the food that their fami-lies will eat. Corn and bean farming is the only type of work available in the communities, and a good harvest for one such farmer will yield enough corn and beans to feed his family for that year. In addition, farmers might have some percentage of their harvest left over which they can then sell for two or three hundred dollars, an amount of money that allows for the purchase of basic necessities. Women in rural El Salvador also work long grueling days, from sunrise to sunset, providing meals and performing all

the household tasks that keep their families running, without any electric-ity or appliances. Even the prepara-tion of a tortilla takes several hours and requires an immense amount of work.

This past year, weather conditions turned the lives of poverty-stricken rural Salvadoran families into an even harder struggle. During El Salvador’s rainy season, devastating hurricanes ripped through the country, and several months of terrible drought followed them in September, October and November of this past year. The farmers in the remote communities were suddenly faced with the fact that their entire bean crop and 60 percent

As the holiday season winds down

The Observer brings to you the first

“Tikkun” feature. Tikkun features

are articles intended to bring attention

to the plight of the needy across the

world and here at home. The articles

provide oppurtunities for us to give

donations to the organizations helping

aid those covered in the articles.

Wikipedia

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The ObserverWednesday, January 12, 2011 B2

Currencybuyers to American products. This makes other countries wor-ried that less of their exports will be bought so they start applying QE to their currencies. Mr. Fish-man explained that when other major world economies see the U.S. implementing QE, “things feel differently to them and that’s what creates this slippery slope where [when] we do quantita-tive easing, they want to do more quantitative easing.” This situa-tion is what a “currency war” is.

Countries have tried to estab-lish a precedent so other coun-tries won’t harm their economies by lowering prices through QE. The International Monetary Fund was established in 1945 specifically to ensure that cur-rency wars did not happen.

China has not been following the rules. China has been buying U.S. bonds, bank notes from the U.S. Government promising that China will receive a set amount U.S. dollars at a later date, in massive quantities. A Financial Times article reported that China has been buying the equivalent of $1 billion a day worth of bonds for the past five years. When China does this they attach their currency (the Renminbi) to the dollar, meaning their currency depreciates along with that of the United States. Doing this creates their own sort of QE for their currency. The more bonds they buy, the less each bond is worth. Therefore, when it comes time to collect on their bonds, they’ll receive a dollar that is worth less and less. This ensures that the Renminbi is consistently deval-ued, even as the Chinese econo-my is booming (something that would normally make a currency gain value). Economists have es-timated that the Renminbi is 20 percent lower than it should be.

There is a debate among economists as to whether a cur-rency war has a negative effect, or any effect at all, on the world economy. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman argues that unless countries begin buy-ing each other’s long-term assets, “a situation with countries buying large amounts of each other’s cur-rency to lower their own, would be harmless but also pointless.” Mr. Fishman believes that mass dilution leads to bankruptcy. “If you keep doing it, what happens is that you start bankrupting your-self and… on a world stage you can start just bankrupting every-one because if everybody’s buying each other’s paper then the pa-per’s backed by less and less valu-able economies because they’re so diluted. You’ve really created a lot of… public sector debt.”

A method called countervail-ing currency intervention has been recommended by some economists to counterbalance countries like

China who are artificially lower-ing their currencies. This process would mean that when China buys $1 billion of U.S. bonds, the U.S. would sell off $1 billion to

“balance” out the situation. This would mean a more even equation of buyers and sellers of the bonds.

While countervailing currency intervention would be an aggres-

sive method in ending the cur-rency war, more diplomatic solu-tions have been raised. There was the Plaza Accord, where in the 1980s world economic leaders

Continued from B1

This chart shows the value of the Chinese Renminibi to the U.S. Dollar from 1982 until 2006. During this time the Chinese economy has grown, while their their currency has been devalued.

El SalvadorContinued from B1

Whilst in Panama and Colombia over winter break, I experienced many spectacular things. I snorkeled in the great Panamanian reefs, seeing fish and coral the likes of which usually only make appearances on the silver screen. I rode in an eight-seat motor boat in the dead of night, no lights even to guide the boat captain, feeling very much like a Navy Seal on a top secret mission. I visited the Panama Canal, which is considered to be one of the seven Wonders of the Mod-ern World—and with good reason: connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans with man-made rivers made to rise and fall in order to get huge cargo ships out of one ocean into the other. In Colombia I visited Cartagena, a beautiful colonial walled city and fortress which was named a Unesco World Heritage site.

One might expect that these or similar experiences I had on my trip to have been the best part of my vacation. The best part of my trip, in fact, was getting bitten by sand flies. This is not because I’m a masochist, but rather because at the same time that I was being bitten, so was my

of their corn crop had been utterly de-stroyed by the hurricanes and drought. As a result of what became a virtually nonexistent harvest, farmers were left with no way to provide any food for their families. They can’t buy corn and beans from other areas because the prices per pound have risen dra-matically since the hurricanes, and are continuing to rise even now. There are no paying jobs besides farming available in these areas, and the big cities of El Salvador are already overcrowded, and have high unem-ployment rates. Farmers are faced with the grim prospect of finding a way for their families to survive until their next harvest in August of 2011.

Jennifer Sklar Gilbert, a young woman who grew up in Tiburon, California, can give an insider’s look at the situation as it continues to de-velop in El Salvador. Ms. Gilbert is the international relations coordinator for Fundahmer (Fundacion Hermano Mercedes Ruiz), a Salvadoran-run nonprofit organization that works against poverty in these rural com-munities through the creation of sister communities, programs in educa-tion and development, scholarship opportunities for Salvadoran youth, nutrition programs, and education for youth groups to help citizens better understand their rights. During the corn and bean crisis, Fundahmer has been providing corn and beans to needy families in exchange for hours of work on beneficial projects for their communities. Gilbert has been living in El Salvador and working for Fundahmer for the past year, and will continue to do so in the coming year. She says that working in over 30 very poor communities in remote regions of the country has helped her to see life from a new perspective. She also comments that “the people in the com-munities feel like my family members. They are so warm, loving, and take me in so enthusiastically.”

Having seen the devastating effects of the corn and bean crisis in the past few months, Ms. Gilbert knows that it affects even more than just feeding the farmers’ families. Even before the weather disasters that struck the area, many citizens of El Salvador couldn’t get to a hospital when they were sick and didn’t have the means to pay for any kind of medication. For many young people in the rural areas, a high school education is nothing more than a wish; attending school beyond the ninth grade involves a cost of roughly fifty dollars a month, practically im-possible for many farming families that earned an average of a dollar a day before the hurricanes and droughts. If problems such as medical care and education were significant in years past, they now seem insurmountable. Gilbert says that when she asked Salvadorans what people could do to help them, they simply asked her to “just tell the people over there about us. Tell people over there what’s hap-pening to us here.”

But how can we help people in the middle of a crisis in a place that seems so removed from our world? JCHS could become a sister community to a Salvadoran High School and help more young people get educated. Maybe, too, the accounts of ter-rible poverty in El Salvador can be a reminder of something else: there are people much closer to home, people in the Bay Area, that face the question of how they will feed their families every day. Two weeks ago, I didn’t know anything about what was going on in El Salvador. Even though I’ve been hearing it my whole life, I finally see how true it is: my own full refrigerator is far from something to be taken for granted.

Address a check to RISES, putting FUNDAHMER in the subject line. Send the check to:RISES/P.O. Box 327Allen Park, Michigan 48101

- It’s a Beautiful Life -

Exploring More Than Coral Reefs & Engineering Marvels: Finding Meaning in Panama

By Ariel Applbaum

father (no I am not a sadist either). The reason this proved to be the best part of my trip is because my father (pictured below) and I decided to walk back towards our boat together, leaving my older brother, sister and mother to examine the starfish on Star Beach. This gave us the oppor-tunity to have a long, heartfelt, and inspirational talk that our busy, work-filled, non-vacation days just wouldn’t permit. We talked about life in gen-eral and assessed aspects of my life from both his and my perspectives. We talked about my academic life, spiritual life, and goals. This allowed my father to give me his thoughts and advice on how to better myself. I will never forget the warmth, connection, and inspiration I experienced.

This is my own personal, recent example of finding inspiration in un-expected places. The thought I want to leave you with is this: value every opportunity, be open to new experi-ences even when they are not the ones you anticipated, and always look on the bright side of a situation -- even if you are getting your tuchus bitten.

sat around with wine and cigars and solved currency issues. While recent meetings like the G-20, a summit of leaders from the world’s largest economic powers, have been unproductive, some recom-mend that the powers take a les-son from the Accord and end the currency war over wine and cigars. Mr. Fishman believed that, “to be quite frank the only solution is to stop spending as much as we do – just stop printing more dollars.”

So what does all this mean? Well, next time you are stand-ing impatiently in the lunch line, think of how the spread of the lunch program to more schools and the lowering of its prices could kick off a mass San Fran-cisco lunch programs’ dilution of food cost, which could bank-rupt everyone. Hopefully that will be enough to chew on before you reach the front of the line.

Applbaum

Family/C

ourtesy

Wikipedia

Once Obama’s presidency began, he quickly started getting attacked by conservatives. Never did Obama come out and defend what he was doing. The economy was getting better, taxes were getting lowered, the War in Iraq was winding down , and yet

Obama’s approval ratings were taking a nosedive. Barack Obama, the practiced orator who had captivated America with his speeches during his campaign, was unable to communicate

what he was doing to help the country. During the healthcare debate, Obama was incapable of explaining that Public Option was not so-cialism and that the government was not taking over anyone’s healthcare. Before Fox News and the conservatives got hold of the argument, over 60% of Americans favored the Public Option. Obama sat idly by while the conservatives convinced America that the government was “shoving healthcare down our throats,” and the Public Option died.

Then came the midterm elections. Shock of all shocks, after Obama spent two years allowing the Democrats to be painted out as un-

Obama Has Abandoned “Principles”

“[T]hank you, Obama, for explain-ing to me... why you won’t stand on your principles.”

American socialists, they got destroyed at the polls. Or, as Obama wanted to describe it, they got “shellacked.” Instead of taking the election as a chance to reaffirm that his administration was rooted in liberal values, he capitulated. He waved the white flag of surrender. He threw true liberals under the proverbial bus. What on earth possessed him to use the word “shellacked,” eludes me. “Destroyed,” “wiped out,” “decimated,” any of these would be acceptable terms for what happened. What happened was the complete and utter destruction of years of work and millions of dollars spent electing Democrats all across the country. The exact system that had allowed him to be elected, had been obliterated, and all he could muster was that the Democrats certainly had been... shellacked?

Then came the tax cuts. Early in Bush’s presidency, Bush and his cronies decided it would be a good idea to give tax cuts to the “American people” (25 percent of these tax cuts went

to the wealthiest Americans). Due to some technicalities they had to allow the tax cuts to expire in 2010. During his campaign, Obama assured voters that he would continue the tax cuts for everyone making less than $200,000, but he wouldn’t allow the tax cuts for people making above that number to expire. Only two percent of the country makes over $200,000 a year, so Obama was promising that 98 per-cent of the country would get to keep their tax breaks. He knew that if he allowed the top two percent to keep their tax breaks, the country would have to go into $750 trillion of debt over the next few decades. The Republicans, though, had different plans.

The ObserverWednesday, January 12, 2011 C1

White House

“He waved the white flag of surren-der. He threw true liberals under the proverbial bus.”

The tax cuts were set to expire on December 31, 2010, at midnight. Obama and the Democrats were ready to renew the tax cuts for the 98 percent of Americans. If they pushed hard enough, it would have been a close vote, but they probably could have squeezed their plan through. They certainly could have tried. Now, at the same time this was all going on, there was a lot of other legislation that Congress had to deal with. Most importantly, extending unemployment checks for the millions of unemployed Americans. However, the Republicans decided that ensuring the richest two percent of the country got their tax breaks was their main priority and they announced that they were going to block everything, including unemployment, from going through Congress, until the rich got their tax cuts extended.

You would think that Obama could have gone on television and told everyone what the Republicans were doing: they were prioritizing the richest Americans above the Americans who had gotten laid off during the Reces-sion. That what they were doing went against any moral and just standard of right and wrong. But no. What did Obama do? He agreed to extend all the tax cuts, even those for the richest Americans.

But Obama did go on television and get angry. With a much harsher tone than he had ever been able to use toward Republcans, he told liberal Democrats that opposed extending tax cuts for the rich that: principles are great, but practically speaking, they’re rather useless. Because after all, he so nicely explained to the liberals of America, you can stand on your principles all day long, but that’s where you’ll be left: standing on your principles, and you won’t get anything done. So thank you, President Obama, for explaining, to me, and all those “principled liberals” who carried you into office, why you refuse to stand on your principles.

- Arno Rosenfeld, Co-editor-in-Chief

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Despite their loss, Boise State is a team that deserves respect and should be taken seriously. In the past three years, they have played seven ranked teams, winning five of those games. They only played at home in two of those games, playing at home is a serious advantage in college football. They would be playing more ranked teams if not for the fact that other teams are afraid to schedule them. In the past three years, Boise’s gone 37-2, but never made it to a national championship. This is because they play weak teams in their Western Ath-letic Conference. They are moving to the Mountain West conference to prove that they can win in a more challenging confer-ence. When they announced their plans to move, some current Mountain West teams fled for greener pastures. I am not saying Boise deserves a national championship, but they deserve the chance to qualify for one. As long as BCS conference teams continue to run and hide instead of facing Boise State, Boise deserves my sympathy.

- Ben Feiner (’12)

RE: “Boise’s WAC” December, 9, 2010

Editor’s Note: The Observer is a student run newspaper, intended to cover topics from the perspective of students, and that are of interest to students. Thoughts and opinions expressed in The Observer are not necessarily those of the Jewish Community High School of the Bay.

The Observer runs stories and covers topics of its choosing. Reporters and photographers are not given instructions by the school prior to writing or photographing. However, the final published product has undergone prior review by members of the professional community of JCHS operat-ing under the instructions of the administration. While The Observer puts a very high value on the integrity of what they publish, stories you read may have been altered or censored to meet the standards required by the JCHS administration in order to allow publication of the paper. When deciding whether to publish altered or censored stories, The Observer weighs the impact of the al-teration or censorship against the overall value of the story. If it is deemed that the alterations and/or censorship does not diminish the story to such an extent that it is no longer of substantial value to the student body of JCHS, those alterations will be accepted.

The Observerest. April 2010

Jewish Community High School of the Bay

Executive Editors Staff Writers Contributing Writers Arno Rosenfeld (’12) Evan Fenner (’13) David Conneran (’11) Elijah Jatovsky (’12) Micah Fenner (’12) Sam Seder (’12) Aviva Herr-Welber (’12) Ami Wulf (’11) Jake Rosenberg (’14) Avrumy Reissberg (’11) Sophie Navarro (’12) Alex Preneta (’12) Photography Shai Tabb (’13) Talia Beck (‘12) Daniella Kesel (’13) Shai Tabb (’13) Evan Fenner (’13)

Maura Feingold printingKarie Rubin faculty adviserMaddy Zacks copy editor

JCHS students seem largely apathetic and uninformed about politics, whether the issue is the midterm elections or the attempts by the US to prosecute Julian As-sange, the head of Wikileaks.

What people don’t seem to realize is that these issues actually matter. When there’s a debate over taxes, that’s some-thing that will directly affect your family and you. When the moral integrity of our country is compromised by forcing gay people to choose between lying or getting booted out of the military, it makes you look bad as an American citizen.

By ignoring politics and the news in general, JCHS students set a precedent for themselves that will lead to either not vot-ing or voting without a full understanding of the issues. If people really want to ignore what little change they can make in the world and waste their votes and their voice, they shouldn’t live in a democracy.

- David Conneran (‘11)

The Apathy Must Stop