Author: Mark Hershlag

(JTA) — Rereading Exodus this month in synagogue reminds me of when I first learned about Moses’ role in freeing the Children of Israel who had been enslaved to Pharaoh. I grew up in Monsey, New York. My mother was Black and my father was white; my family identified with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. I discovered […]

(JTA) — I started reporting on North American Jews and Israel in the last century, and for years covered the debate over whether Jews in the Diaspora had a right to criticize the Israeli government in public. The debate sort of petered out in the early-1990s, when Israel itself began talking about a Palestinian state, […]

(JTA) — In January, 24-year-old Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills collapsed on the field after experiencing cardiac arrest. His team and the entire NFL community rallied around him. His first words upon awakening: “Who won?”   Although Hamlin’s medical crisis was a rare on-field occurrence, the trauma surrounding his collapse stirred up age-old questions for […]

(JTA) — The last eight years have been the hottest in recorded history, causing untold damage across the world — and that destruction is not something that we can reverse with the flick of a switch. We can’t instantly turn back the floods in California nor solve its decade-long drought. We can’t immediately end the […]

(JTA) — In the weeks since Israel’s latest government was sworn in, questions relating to assimilation, defining Jewish identity and what it means to be a Zionist have been central to the public and political discourse, which in some ways is perhaps more heated and divisive than it has ever been. One useful addition to […]

(JTA) — You’d think that in a country so closely identified with Anne Frank — perhaps the Holocaust’s best-known victim — cultivating memory of the genocide wouldn’t be a steep challenge. That’s why a recent survey, suggesting what the authors called a “disturbing” lack of knowledge in the Netherlands about the Holocaust, set off alarm […]

(JTA) — Today, we will visit Auschwitz-Birkenau to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. We will represent the United States and honor the lives of 6 million Jews and millions of others murdered. While at Auschwitz, we will also express gratitude to the survivors and speak of the lessons learned in that era of terror. As […]

(JTA) — I recently attended a bris in my community where the mohel announced to the new parents and the whole room, “Raising this child is the most important and impactful thing you will ever do.”  These words were offered to anchor the already exhausted and overwhelmed couple in the sanctity of the job they […]

(JTA) — Eric Alterman, born in 1960, says the view of Israel he absorbed growing up in a Jewish family in suburban Scarsdale, New York, was decidedly one-sided.  “I went on this nerdy presidential classroom thing when I was in high school,” he recalls, “and some Christian kid from the South raised his hand and […]