(JTA) — Any rabbi seeking to connect his or her High Holiday sermons to current events has plenty to draw from this year. There’s the global public health crisis that has claimed more than 4 million lives. There’s the recent conflict in Israel and Gaza. There’s the cloud of climate change and its accelerating impacts […]
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(JTA) — Eleven years ago, the Anti-Defamation League surprised many by opposing an Islamic center planned for Lower Manhattan, blocks from the World Trade Center site the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even as its leader denounced anti-Muslim bigotry. Now, the ADL’s CEO says the position, taken four years before he joined the civil rights organization, […]
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(JTA) — Meryl Jaffe says she’s like any Jewish parent keeping track of her kids on social media, except it can be terrifying. When she heard President Joe Biden deployed 3,000 Marines to Afghanistan, she had a gut feeling that her son Matt — she calls him Matthew — was among them. Her family was […]
Continue ReadingTranslated from the Russian by Valzhyna Mort (English follows the Russian, below.) “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” philosopher Theodor Adorno famously wrote. To which poet Paul Celan (in Pierre Joris’s translation) retorted: “What concept of the ‘poem’ is being presented here? The arrogance of the one who dares hypothetically-speculatively to contemplate or poetically describe […]
Continue ReadingYesterday, Texas enacted its six-week abortion ban, Senate Bill 8 (SB8), effectively banning some 85% of abortions taking place in the state. Republican-controlled state legislatures have attempted to pass six-week abortion bans across the South and the Midwest for years, but all previous efforts were either vetoed by governors or struck down by the courts. […]
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(JTA) — Six months after his internet posts attacking Jews came to light, a U.S. Foreign Service officer remains employed by the State Department while at least 70 of his co-workers sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanding his dismissal. The letter, sent July 28, argues that Fritz Berggren is a threat […]
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HANNAH WILKE MADE HER FIRST VAGINAS in the early 1960s. They were small vulval shapes formed from clay or pliable kneaded erasers—sometimes bearing irreverent, punning titles (“Needed-Erase-Her”)—that Wilke described variously as “one-fold gestural sculptures” or “wounds.” She affixed the sculptures to postcards and other surfaces. In some cases, she arranged them according to the geometric […]
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(JTA) — Last week, Delta Airlines pilot Alexander Kahn flew hundreds of Afghan refugees from Germany to Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C., as part of a U.S. government partnership with commercial airlines. It had extra special meaning for Kahn, as he told CNN, for a few reasons — first and foremost, his own father was […]
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(JTA) — Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie was far from the first Republican lawmaker to compare public health measures aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19 to the Holocaust when he posted an image of a tattooed wrist on Twitter on Wednesday. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have also done so, along with several […]
Continue ReadingRecently I spoke with David Renton, a British socialist and historian who is the author of the newly published book Labour’s Antisemitism Crisis: What the Left Got Wrong and How We Can Learn From It. We discussed the British Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, who was ousted last year following dismal election […]
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