Maddison Spiegel of Westchester County, New York, had tried for years to go on a Birthright trip to Israel but somehow it never happened. The first time she was supposed to go the COVID-19 pandemic got in the way, freezing all trips. The next time Spiegel applied she learned belatedly she had missed a deadline. […]
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When Russian troops invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Yuliia, 26, a Jewish single mother of three from Kherson, barely had time to flee her hometown before it fell to Russian control. After reaching relative safety in nearby Mykolaiv, Yuliia worried about how she’d support herself and her children. Previously a census taker for the […]
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Youssef, a Syrian refugee now living in Stockholm, is in the unique position of having a job where he helps other refugees. He works at a Swedish recruitment agency, Randstad, guiding refugees through job applications, translations from Swedish, and interview prep. “I have gone through many difficulties as a refugee,” said Youssef, who asked that […]
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When Argentina’s president Javier Milei was named in mid-January as the recipient of this year’s Genesis Prize, it marked the first time the $1 million annual award, sometimes called the “Jewish Nobel,” was given to someone who isn’t Jewish. Stan Polovets, co-founder and chairman of the Genesis Prize Foundation, recently sat down for an interview […]
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When ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt spoke in December at an event in New York, he told the audience, “If you ask me today’s date, I would tell you it’s October 8.” The leader of ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) was discussing the coordinated attacks on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam in early November following a match […]
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A unique Holocaust art exhibition opened this week in New York’s City Hall. In “The Wandering Jew,” a 1947 oil-and-canvas painting by Dutch artist Eliazer Neuberger, a barefoot man wearing torn garments gazes forward while behind him an elderly mysterious figure who evokes the prophet Elijah raises his hand in blessing. A 1945 pencil-and-watercolor drawing […]
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Aliza Gettenberg of Lawrence, New York, knew she wanted to become a dentist after someone’s description of the occupation as the “perfect combination of doctor, engineer and artist” struck a chord with her. But first she had to find a dental school that fit her professional vision. She sought a program focused on dentistry’s digital future, […]
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Sasha Chanoff recalls the day he was forced to make one of the most painful decisions of his life. It was 2000, only six years after the genocide in Rwanda, and Chanoff — a Finnish-born Jew working with the International Organization for Migration — was sent to neighboring Congo on a risky mission: drive to […]
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TEL AVIV — During a week when Israel faced multiple ballistic missile attacks from Yemen and renewed rocket fire out of Gaza, the 500 or so Israelis with Soviet roots who gathered in Tel Aviv on Dec. 29 for a full-day festival of Jewish learning didn’t seem much perturbed. “Even in these hard and complicated […]
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As 350 Jews with roots in the former Soviet Union gathered recently for a weekend conference at a Canadian Niagara Falls resort, Montreal was experiencing one of the worst outbreaks of antisemitic violence in Canada in this century. Hundreds of protesters smashed shop windows, attacked police officers, set fire to cars, and waved Hamas and […]
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