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The Forward
New Jersey high school yearbook ‘error’ deemed not antisemitic after investigation
(JTA) — A New Jersey high school yearbook’s misprint of a photo of Muslim students in place of its Jewish Student Union “was not purposeful, but rather was a highly unfortunate error,” an independent investigator has concluded.. The controversy at East Brunswick High School was one of several yearbook incidents that had concerned Jewish parents...
With never-before-seen security cam footage, movie brings viewers inside tense hostage crisis at Texas synagogue
One of the most surprising moments in the taut new documentary Colleyville — and one of the most illuminating — involves, of all things, a Pizza Hut. About eight hours after a gun-toting Muslim extremist entered a Texas synagogue on a Shabbat morning in January 2022, and said he had a bomb in his backpack,...
His family survived the Holocaust. He survived long COVID. It’s Josh Fox’s ‘survivor’s obligation’ to fight the oil industry
The director Josh Fox, in the face of global pandemic, the disease of political extremism and an impending ecological omnicide, suggests you dig your own grave and lie in it. If this sounds like admitting defeat, it’s quite the opposite. “It felt like coming home,” said Fox, who directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland and the...
We’re in a psychological war with ‘the greatest propaganda machine in history’ — will we survive it?
Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind By Annalee Newitz WW Norton, 272 pages, $28 It used to be we knew who our friends were and who we were fighting against. Maybe sometimes there was a fifth column working to undermine us, but even that term coined in the Spanish Civil War is...
Jewish seniors nonprofit Dorot rocked by budget cuts
Dorot, a Jewish nonprofit based in New York City, has spent decades trying to alleviate loneliness among older adults, but the COVID-19 pandemic put its work into the spotlight. The organization was perfectly positioned to help seniors unable to leave their homes, and Dorot’s team of volunteers were featured on CNN and NPR, talking about...
She came to New York hoping to escape Israeli politics. Instead, she founded a protest movement
(New York Jewish Week) — When Shany Granot-Lubaton saw the picture of her mother at a protest in Tel Aviv, she began to cry — and knew she needed to do something. Shany and her husband, Omer Lubaton-Granot, had arrived in New York City four months earlier, in the fall of 2022, so he could...
Hebrew Union College to admit and ordain rabbinical students in interfaith relationships, ending longstanding ban
(JTA) — Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary, will begin admitting and ordaining students who are in relationships with non-Jews, following a decision by its board to drop a longstanding ban on interfaith relationships for rabbinical students. The decision brings the rules for rabbinical students at HUC in line with norms across the...
Google is answering search queries with AI now. What does that mean for Holocaust history?
What if, when you Googled a question about Holocaust history, instead of being taken to, say, Wikipedia or a news article, you were just given a few bullet points written by artificial intelligence? This is the sort of thing a new UNESCO report, “AI and the Holocaust: Rewriting History?” warns about. The report, which was...
Protests, political action in France after alleged antisemitic rape of 12-year-old Jewish girl
(JTA) — A shocking incident in which two teenage boys have been charged with the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in a suburb of Paris has sparked a reckoning across France, with Jewish groups taking to the streets to protest rising antisemitism and President Emmanuel Macron pushing to address antisemitism in schools. Macron reportedly...
I don’t like my friend’s boyfriend. Do I have to invite him to my wedding?
A Bintel Brief, Yiddish for a bundle of letters, has been solving reader dilemmas since 1906. Send yours via email, social media or this form. Dear Bintel, My partner and I are in the midst of planning our upcoming nuptials and that, of course, means coming up with a guest list. Our plan is to...
Wikipedia called the ADL ‘unreliable.’ It’s a wake-up call the civil rights organization badly needs
In the wake of Wikipedia declaring the Anti-Defamation League a “generally unreliable” source on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, there are two paths forward for the essential American Jewish institution: defensiveness or self-reflection. I vote for self-reflection. The decision by Wikipedia editors tells users of the massively popular online information source that the ADL “should normally not...
What is Within Our Lifetime, the anti-Israel activist group behind the protests at the Nova exhibit and Brooklyn Museum?
(New York Jewish Week) — When anti-Israel activists protested outside a Lower Manhattan exhibition commemorating the victims of the Nova music festival massacre on Oct. 7, they were condemned as antisemitic by some of Israel’s critics as well as its defenders. On the way to the protest, masked activists had swarmed subway cars, demanding any...
Why I (finally) took down my ‘We Stand With Israel’ sign
MONTCLAIR, New Jersey — My teenage daughter saw it first, as she walked up the path after school. Someone had stuck a sheet of lined notebook paper to the “We Stand With Israel” lawn sign at the foot of our steps. Using a ball-point pen, they’d scrawled a single word in all-caps: GENOCIDE. My daughter,...
Online conference seeks role for Yiddish in the future of Holocaust studies
Since universities began offering Holocaust studies, very little of their research has focused on the role that the Yiddish language and culture played for many of the victims, survivors and other Ashkenazi Jews around the world. An upcoming online conference, Yiddish and the Holocaust: New Approaches, hopes to articulate a purposeful, innovative role for Yiddish...
To save Israel, give Netanyahu a plea deal
It’s time for Israeli prosecutors to swallow a bitter pill and save their country. They must sign a plea deal with Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s years-long trials are a kind of anomaly within Middle East politics. On the one hand, they have nothing to do with the war. On the other hand, they are determining the...
Eugene Vindman, whose Jewish immigrant story featured in Trump’s first impeachment trial, wins primary in Virginia
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — A former White House official whose Jewish Ukrainian origins played a prominent role in Donald Trump’s first impeachment hearings won a Democratic congressional primary in Virginia on Tuesday. Elsewhere in the state, two prominent Jewish Democrats failed to secure a win in a primary in the increasingly Democratic Washington D.C. suburbs...
Our Fates are Intertwined: Lessons from the Erev Rav
Each Passover, we recount our people’s harrowing escape from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering that followed. A lesser told part of the story is that the Israelites left Egypt with an Erev Rav — a mixed multitude of people from all walks of life — who set out together in pursuit of something...
The Jewish Case for Inclusion, Equity, and Justice — By Whatever Name
We recently celebrated Shavuot, the holiday marking the giving of the Torah. But when discussing Shavuot, the Torah itself never mentions the giving of the Torah; the Sages had to connect the dots. Instead, the Torah gives three names for that holiday: Festival of Weeks (Shavuot); Festival of Reaping; and Day of First-Fruits. All three...
Moving Through Mitzrayim Toward Freedom and Possibility
In Jewish tradition, we count the days between Passover and Shavuot, commemorating the days between when the Israelites moved from mitzrayim, or ‘narrow straits’ of Egypt to receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai. During this time, we reflect on the middot or moral principles needed to make this transition from slavery to freedom. In our...
Equity and Justice Values from a Jewish Perspective: The Jewish value of ongoing practice to make change in ourselves and our communities
The Jewish people’s covenantal relationship with HaShem in the Torah and in our tradition is founded and built on the ethic and ongoing practice of justice and equity. It’s clear that justice and equity were meant to be an ongoing practice for all the Israelites because HaShem created the world not as a utopian society,...
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