JERUSALEM (JTA) — They came armed with knives and wire cutters looking for a Jewish target. It was a Friday night, the Sabbath eve of March 11, and Palestinian teenagers Amjad Awad, 19, and Hakim Awad, 18, both from the Palestinian village of Awarta, hurried through the dark… Read more »
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Inspiring Jewish identity: politics is not the answer
In June 2010 Peter Beinart published his famous article in The New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” in which he concludes that young American Jews have checked their Zionism at the door of liberalism. Based on Beinart’s assessment, I arrived in the United… Read more »
A Jewish leader who can’t be called to the Torah?
Under a cloudless blue sky, in a square wedged between the National Assembly and the Rectorate of the University of Sofia, Alexander Oscar, the young president of Sofia’s Jewish community, issued a blunt message to his countrymen. The occasion was Bulgaria’s Holocaust remembrance ceremony on March 10, a day… Read more »
Temple Emanu-El adding kindergarten
Temple Emanu-El’s Olga and Bob Strauss Early Childhood Education Center will add a full-day kindergarten class beginning in fall 2011. The kindergarten will include a fully integrated secular and Judaic curriculum, with an emphasis on emergent education, in which a teacher observes children’s natural interests and expands on them… Read more »
Israel launching drive to void Goldstone Report
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would launch an international campaign to cancel the Goldstone Report after its author, ex-South African Judge Richard Goldstone, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post that Israel did not intentionally target civilians as a policy during the Gaza War,… Read more »
Amid violence, pen pals in Congress focus on Israel
WASHINGTON (JTA) – It happens almost like clockwork: Something happens in the Middle East, and it reverberates across the Atlantic with new letters from the U.S. Congress. With so many relatively new members looking to establish their pro-Israel credentials, the reaction in Congress to the recent violence in Israel… Read more »
Film explores power of one woman’s kindness
“A Small Act,” an award-winning documentary about a Holocaust survivor’s $15 a month contribution to educate a child in Kenya, will be screened Sunday, April 10 at 2 p.m. at the Tucson Jewish Community Center. In the 1930s, Hilde Back’s parents sent her from Germany to Sweden to escape… Read more »
CUFI’s second Israel night to feature survivor
Holocaust survivor Irving Roth will be the keynote speaker when Christians United for Israel at the University of Arizona hosts its second Night to Honor Israel. The dinner event will take place on Monday, April 11, the 66th anniversary of Roth’s liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp. It will… Read more »
Discrimination focus of museum exhibit, film
The Jewish History Museum will exhibit “Discrimination Yesterday & Today: A Look at the Cause of the Holocaust,” April 3 through May 14. The exhibit will feature the FBI’s “Enduring Eyes” Holocaust posters and anti-Semitic literature and artifacts from the JHM permanent collection, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the… Read more »
On visit to Tucson, J Street policy director explains group’s mission
J Street, a pro-peace, pro-Israel lobbying group and political action committee, is often presented in the media as a left-wing counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. But that’s not J Street’s mission, Hadar Susskind, J Street policy and strategic planning director, told a lunch crowd of about… Read more »
Murder of West Bank family members spurs protests, new housing approval
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Demonstrations in solidarity with settlers and a Cabinet committee’s approval for new housing in the West Bank are among the Israeli responses to the suspected terrorist attack that killed five members of a West Bank Jewish family. An estimated 20,000 people attended the March 13 funeral at a cemetery… Read more »
Temple to celebrate humanitarian Jill Rich
Temple Emanu-El will honor Temple member and local humanitarian Jill Rich at a brunch on Sunday, April 3 at 10:30 a.m. at Skyline Country Club. Honored by President George H.W. Bush, charitable organizations and businesses throughout Arizona for her accomplishments over the years, Rich “is truly a treasured local… Read more »
Latin jazz, klezmer fusion to aid teen coalition
The Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona and the Tucson Jewish Community Center will present a benefit concert, “Beyond the Tribes: A Latin Jazz and Klezmer Extravaganza,” featuring the Miami-based Klezmer Company Orchestra on Tuesday, March 29 at the JCC. The evening will start at 6:45 p.m. with Latin dance… Read more »
After cancer, biblical scholar James Kugel considers religious belief
PASADENA, Calif. (JTA) — When Jewish biblical scholar James Kugel was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer in 2000, he didn’t find religion. The world-renowned academic and author of numerous books, including the acclaimed “How to Read the Bible,” already was a practicing Orthodox Jew. Instead, Kugel… Read more »
FSU Jewish women take women’s case to U.N., D.C.
(JTA) — When Elena Kalnitskaya of Ukraine talked about her organization’s women’s empowerment projects at a United Nations conference last month, she was presenting the face of social progress in her country. And she was doing it as a Jewish woman — not unusual, perhaps, for an American participant… Read more »
What the Civil War meant for American Jews, then and now
WALTHAM, Mass. (the Forward) — The 150th anniversary of the Civil War is upon us. April 12 is the anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, the war’s opening shot. From then, through the sesquicentennial anniversary on April 9, 2015 of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House… Read more »
News analysis: Arab unrest alters power balance in as yet unseen ways
WASHINGTON (JTA) — They were the devils they knew. Though Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, surrounded by countries whose leaders or people wish its destruction, over the years it had adjusted to the status quo, more or less figuring out how to get by while keeping an eye… Read more »
Weintraubs give their name, endowment to Israel Center
Ron and Diane Weintraub, who helped found Tucson’s Israel Center, have Israeli connections that run deep. Long before their daughter Beth made aliyah in 1986 with her future husband and gave them four Israeli grandchildren, Ron had relatives in Israel, including an aunt from Cleveland who made aliyah in… Read more »
Egypt uprising carries echoes of Poland’s Solidarity movement 30 years ago
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (JTA) — The day after Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak was ousted by a widespread public uprising, I found myself presenting a lecture about Solidarity, the mass trade union movement that convulsed Poland 30 years ago and paved the way for the collapse of the Iron Curtain… Read more »
Op-ed: We must turn Israel inside out
This is an extraordinary time for the Middle East, an unprecedented one, a glorious one – and it’s passing Israel by. Since Mubarak’s fall, we’re trying to be good sports, good losers, trying to grin and bear it, saying mabruk, congratulations, and all that. This week we’re rooting for… Read more »