Category: Opinion

(JTA) — Anyone teaching the past by skipping over the unpleasant parts isn’t teaching history. They are engaged in propaganda. Jewish tradition understands this: Refusing to sugarcoat their own people’s culpability, the Sages themselves teach that the destruction of the Temple by the Romans is a consequence of baseless hatred — among Jews. Yet in […]

(JTA) — Until a 13-story building inexplicably collapsed in the middle of the night, placing the whereabouts and lives of 159 residents in doubt, few gave Surfside, Florida, very much thought before last week. The town was, after all, a South Florida misnomer. There’s no surfing. The white caps on the Atlantic Ocean never provide […]

(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — After several years of big wins for insurgent progressive Democrats in New York City — including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — this week’s municipal primary was regarded by some as a test of their strength, especially when a surge in shootings and homicides has provided fodder for attacks on […]

(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — The two of us have spent most of our lives working for two causes: Israel and the Democratic Party. For a long time we experienced very little dissonance or disagreement. If you were pro-Israel, you were most likely a Democrat. If you were a Democrat, you were most likely […]

This article originally appeared on Kveller. I’m an American Jew from New York who now lives in Paris. What brought me here at the age of 68 in the middle of a  pandemic? That’s a long story — a long marriage, a sudden death, trying to put my life back together and deciding instead to […]

(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 […]

(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. […]

(JTA) — The COVID-19 epidemic proves you cannot just treat a plague’s symptoms – you must root it out. Yet as incidents of Jew-bullying in the U.S. more than doubled in May compared to the same time period in 2020, too many American Jews complained about the symptoms while obscuring the cause. In a polarized […]

(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 […]