As Christians and Jews gather during their respective Easter and Passover holidays, we should recall all that Jews and liberal Protestants in America share and have accomplished together. But pride in the past should not blind us to the danger that this relationship could be derailed by pernicious responses to the Arab-Israeli conflict within certain [...]
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Mark Twain famously distrusted statistics. This was due to their malleability. Ask the question the right way, and you can claim a mandate for anything. In contemporary society, statistics are often used to provide “unbiased evidence” for our pre-existing viewpoints. This is not to say that statistics tell us nothing useful. I believe they tell [...]
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Last week, many of us followed with much anxiety the Supreme Court debate about the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, referred to in some circles as “Obamacare.” Of great interest to the average American was the challenge to the requirement that almost all Americans have health insurance coverage. This requirement is needed, economists say, [...]
Read More »SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) – Pundits have been pointing fingers since a recent poll found that 50 percent of Mississippi and Alabama GOP supporters said they believe that President Obama is a Muslim (with approximately another 40 percent in both states saying they are unsure). Some accuse Republicans of attempting to raise questions about Obama’s Christian [...]
Read More »Last month, a contingent of leaders from the North American Conservative movement returned to the United States. All the members of this mission, rabbis, congregation leaders and philanthropists, had already been to Israel dozens of times. They are major activists in Jewish Federations, AIPAC, Hadassah, you name it. They didn’t come as tourists; they came [...]
Read More »(JTA) — Thirty years ago, a Jewish woman experiencing domestic violence had few places to turn. Community leaders strongly resisted acknowledging violence for fear that it would harm marriages and break up families. Few services existed for women seeking support in a Jewish setting. Prior to 1994, the U.S. government did not even recognize domestic [...]
Read More »Israel’s best kept secret is not of the “maybe yes, maybe no” variety. In fact it is a “yes” so definitive that it has 162 million Google entries. Honest. That’s Google’s response when you type in “Israel’s nuclear policy” — books, articles, essays, arguments, all blithely recognizing that Israel has nuclear arms. Yet technically, Israel [...]
Read More »WASHINGTON (JTA) — During February, Jewish communities across North America observe Jewish Disability Awareness Month. It is an opportunity for us to raise awareness of the needs, strengths, opportunities and challenges of individuals with disabilities in our communities, and to ensure we are building more inclusive communities that celebrate all of our neighbors. The Jewish [...]
Read More »WASHINGTON (JTA) — A spate of recent media reports has discussed the inclusion of ultranationalists in the Russian protest movement. Jewish organizations, sensitive to the fragility of a newly emergent Russian civil society and Jewish community, need to speak out against this inclusion. Ultranationalism and xenophobia are not unique to Russia. Every democratic society has [...]
Read More »WASHINGTON (JTA) — The link between hatred of Jews and of the only Jewish state often requires little conjecture. This is particularly so in the Arab world, where cultivated popular anti-Semitism has been ignored abroad as an impetus of regional conflict. For evidence that anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East is not merely characterized by [...]
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