“How were your holidays?” is an entertaining question to receive as a clergyperson when it comes to the High Holidays. Usually, the honest answer is “exhausting” but the one I give is “great!”, so as not to seem too downtrodden by the biggest Jewish moments of the year. However, in this second year of social […]
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(JTA) — More than one in five Jewish adults who play online multiplayer games faced antisemitism while playing, according to a new survey from the Anti-Defamation League. The survey, published Wednesday, found that harassment and bigotry are common across the 97 million Americans who play multiplayer games. Among adult gamers surveyed, 83% said they have […]
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(JTA) — Of all the people to interview on Rosh Hashanah, the Israeli writer and director Hagai Levi is especially fitting. A respected creator in Israeli and American TV, he is known for shows that dramatize two people talking in a room, much as we were doing ourselves, albeit over Zoom. HBO’s “In Treatment,” for […]
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Cubs-Cardinals, Michigan-Ohio State, Republican-Democrat — if you love a good rivalry between legends, perhaps you’ve been enjoying the series of Hillel-Shammai debates that have so far formed the backbone of Tractate Beitzah. On today’s daf, we’re reminded that while Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai represent different schools of thought and are often at odds, they do […]
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(JTA) — Between 2008 and 2011, one of the ways I survived in yeshiva was “The Wire,” HBO’s groundbreaking police drama. Tosafot and Rambam throughout the day, Brother Mouzone, Avon Barksdale and McNulty late at night. Our beit midrash had a main lower part and an upper part up some steps. These were the low […]
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When the rabbis tackle big ideas, they rarely signal they are doing so. This means that you never know when a mundane halakhic argument will suddenly reveal a much deeper clash. Such is the case on today’s page, when a deceptively innocent debate about a tiny turn of phrase in a blessing reveals a major philosophical divide. […]
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(JTA) — Ephraim Einhorn, a rabbi and businessman who helmed Taiwan’s fledgling Jewish community after a career that included clandestine missions on behalf of oppressed Jews, has died. Einhorn’s death on Wednesday morning in Taipei, just hours before the beginning of Yom Kippur, came after an extended illness and weeks of intermittent hospitalizations. He had […]
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(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has made Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, and his Arab-Israeli coalition partner Mansour Abbas thinks he knows why. “It all comes down to courage,” Abbas, the leader of the first Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition, writes in the accompanying blurb […]
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(JTA) — Shonna Levin is an Orthodox Jew, but she won’t be spending Yom Kippur in a synagogue. The Brooklyn activist had planned to set up camp in Prospect Park, where she was going to host an all-day gathering for Jews with eating disorders for whom the holiday centered around fasting can be especially difficult. […]
Continue ReadingON JUNE 11th, Mohammad Kana’neh joined a few hundred protesters at a weekly demonstration against settlement expansion in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem that has become a flashpoint for protests against Palestinian displacement. Kana’neh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and prominent leader of the secular Arab nationalist Abnaa el-Balad movement, stood under the […]
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