Tagged FRONT

Ellen Melamed’s medical humanities courses at the University of Arizona are encouraging medical students to develop empathetic relationships with their future patients. Melamed, the child of Holocaust survivors, draws on her family’s history of trauma and illness, as well as her own experiences in the arts, to inform her… Read more »

Kate Stewart, the lead archivist at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson, profiles the life of librarian Ruth Rappaport in her first biography, “A Well-Read Woman: The Life, Loves, and Legacy of Ruth Rappaport,” released this spring by Little A Publishing. Rappaport grew up in Nazi Germany, reading banned… Read more »

Ari Slater will be lifting his voice as part of the Reveille Men’s Chorus when they present “Bless Our Show(tunes)” this weekend. Slater, office assistant at the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona, says he started out singing for fun at the Thursday night piano bar at the Dusty Monk,… Read more »

The Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona took a proactive stance to harden local vigilance, bringing on 23-year law enforcement and security veteran Paul Patterson in March as the Jewish community security director. Patterson is assisting all area synagogues and agencies with facility security assessments, ensuring best practices and up-to-date… Read more »

(JTA) — May 9 was Israel’s Independence Day, which commemorates the country’s official Declaration of Independence in 1948. The country celebrated with rallies, fireworks displays, flyovers by the Israeli Air Force and family barbecues. It was a hard-fought independence — the day after the declaration, a coalition of Arab… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) – Anti-Jewish incidents made up more than half the hate crimes reported in New York City in 2018 and so far this year. The 71st Precinct, which includes the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, reported nine incidents, the most of any precinct in the five boroughs.… Read more »

(JTA) — After decades of relative obscurity, the tale of the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara has become one of the best-known Holocaust rescue stories, rivaling those of Oskar Schindler and Irena Sendler. The late Sugihara, who issued thousands of life-saving visas to Jewish refugees in Lithuania in defiance of… Read more »

Within months of graduating from a Jewish high school near Boston in 2017, Asher Dale had an internship that he “absolutely loved” at Forter, an Israeli technology startup that sells online fraud protection services. The company, which processes more than $50 billion in transactions annually for a global network… Read more »

(JTA) — Jews are being persecuted as disease carriers amid the outbreak of measles, a New York haredi Orthodox rabbi said at a symposium with leaders of the anti-vaccination movement attended by hundreds of haredim. “We Hasidim have been chosen as the target,” said Rabbi Hillel Handler, a Holocaust… Read more »

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) — Walking on the scorched and scarred sidewalks of this capital city’s main square five years ago, Eduard Dolinsky felt hopeful and proud. A member of Kiev’s large Jewish population and a longtime activist for its communal causes, Dolinsky had hoped that the bloody street fights… Read more »

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) — Jews have lived in Ukraine for such a long time that their arrival here predates even the first recorded use of the country’s name. Starting in the ninth century, Jews began settling between Uzhgorod and Lugansk — respectively the westernmost and easternmost cities of what… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — In his most recent novel, “kaddish.com,” Nathan Englander imagines a website that a character — encumbered by Jewish guilt — uses to hire someone to say the traditional mourner’s prayer for his late father. In interviews, the author has said the idea was inspired by the… Read more »

(JTA) — Viewers of soccer on Telemundo are likely familiar with the “gooooooooaaaal” call that their announcers helped make famous. Those who’ve watched that American Spanish language network during a World Cup, Olympics or other major soccer tournament have probably heard Sammy Sadovnik call a game. Sadovnik is a… Read more »

(JTA) — On Tuesday night, the NBA held its draft lottery, determining in which order each of its teams would pick players in next month’s draft. It made headlines for a couple of reasons: First, the consensus No. 1 pick, Zion Williamson of Duke, is the most hyped basketball player… Read more »

This story originally appeared on The Nosher. It is rare that I do anything these days without a podcast for company: cooking, walking the dog and, yes, falling asleep. They are, I suppose, the millennial equivalent of having the radio murmuring softly in the background. And just like radio,… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — On April 16, Dzanc Books announced its latest release, “The Siege of Tel Aviv,” a novel that imagines an Iran-led attack on Israel that leaves the country decimated. Author Hesh Kestin, a former journalist who had already published two novels with the small independent press,… Read more »

(JTA) — Judging by all the media attention, the world loves short Jewish women named Ruth. One of them, Ruth Westheimer — better known as the renowned sex therapist Dr. Ruth — is on the phone to talk about her life and a new documentary about it. But first… Read more »

(JTA) —It’s glitzy. It’s kitschy. It’s like a musical Olympics or “American Idol” on steroids. Welcome to the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual pageant in which all of Europe (and some of its neighbors) send national representatives to  compete for the best forgettable pop song and most unforgettable outfits.… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) — When Israel won the right to host this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the event was anticipated as a golden opportunity to showcase a side of the nation rarely seen in global coverage of the “conflict.” Then the rockets began to fall. Over the weekend, Hamas… Read more »

POWAY, Calif. (JTA) — “Those who are standing can remain standing,” Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein joked, a nod to the standing-room-only crowd that had packed Chabad of Poway for Friday night services. For many of those who filled the sanctuary, showing up was an act of faith, of solidarity, of… Read more »