(JTA) — To everything there is a season. June is Pride season, one where LGBTQ people proudly refuse to choose between our identities and our demand for the freedom to live equally and without fear. A Wider Bridge, which builds meaningful relationships between LGBTQ people in North America and Israel, has always stood for our […]
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(JTA) — It’s June. For me, a lot happens this month. Father’s Day is coming up — my fifth as a father of twin boys. It’s Pride Month, and as a gay Jewish man, married with children, that means something. It’s also my father’s 41st yahrtzeit, the anniversary of his passing. My dear father, Khalil. […]
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This article originally appeared on Alma. I am a camp person through and through. Camp has always been my happy place. For a long time it was the only place I felt genuinely Jewish. I grew up being the only Jew most people in my hometown knew, and switched synagogues several times. I never felt […]
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(JTA) — On March 13, nearly a year to the day after Temple Beth El of Charlotte, North Carolina, closed due to COVID-19, Rabbi Dusty Klass gathered the congregation’s 900 households for a shared — albeit remote — Jewish experience. Unable to gather her community for worship, Klass and her colleagues, including operations manager Nathalie […]
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(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Whether this week marks the last of Benjamin Netanyahu’s record-setting tenure as prime minister or is just a prelude to another never-count-him-out comeback, it seems a fitting moment to try to understand why he has consistently treated diaspora Jewish media with disdain. It’s something I’ve experienced personally on […]
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The world moves so fast that what seemed groundbreaking just a week ago already feels like a distant memory. Last Friday, I arrived back home after leading the first solidarity mission of Jewish leaders from North America to arrive in Israel following Operation Guardian of the Walls and the year and a half of the […]
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This article originally appeared on The New York Jewish Week. Just a few weeks ago, the streets of New York City were filled with thousands of people shouting “intifada” while also claiming “Black Lives Matter.” In that same period, a violent pro-Palestinian mob attacked Jews on the streets of New York. Others violently assaulted Jews […]
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(JTA) — My grandpa once told me a story about when my great-grandparents were on a steamship emigrating from Ukraine to Cuba in the 1920s, shortly before my grandpa was born. As the story went, my great-grandmother saw a Black man for the first time and she screamed and hid. My grandpa told the story […]
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(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — In the 1960s, the Communist Party cut the Russian Jews off from the Jewish people. They prohibited them from wearing tefillin, or celebrating b’nai mitzvah, or expressing support for the State of Israel. They intimidated and imprisoned them. And the Communist Party governed with one big antisemitic lie: […]
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(JTA) — “Rabbi Adar, is it dangerous to wear my Jewish star?” In 12 years of teaching “Introduction to the Jewish Experience” through HaMaqom|The Place in the San Francisco Bay Area, no student ever asked me that question in those words. This year three students have asked it of me. The first student who asked […]
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