Maxwell Greenberg The Jewish History Museum/Holocaust History Center will welcome its first scholar-in-residence, Maxwell Greenberg of the University of California, Los Angeles, later this month. Greenberg, a doctoral candidate in UCLA’s Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicano/a Studies, will discuss his research in the museum’s final gallery chat for the season,… Read more »
Jill Cooper Udall leads a seder aboard a U.S. military aircraft 30,000 feet over Vietnam, April 19, 2019. (Courtesy of Cooper Udall)
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Air National Guard pilot gave Jill Cooper Udall the all-clear: There were storm warnings, but she had 10 turbulence-free minutes to get through her seder. Cooper Udall, who is married to Tom Udall, a Democrat and the senior senator from New Mexico, waved the 25… Read more »
Phish performs on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," Oct. 10, 2016. The band members are, from left: Page McConnell on keyboard, Trey Anastasio on guitar, Jon Fishman (barely pictured) on drums and Mike Gordon on bass. (Andrew Lipovsky/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank)
(JTA) — Gary Stein remembers the first time someone played a Phish song for him in high school. It was “Divided Sky,” an intricate 11-minute tune that shows off the group’s diverse jam rock chops. Stein, who’s now a 30-year-old history doctoral student living in Los Angeles, quickly became… Read more »
Debra Katz, left, looks on as Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sept. 27, 2018. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
(JTA) — Fighting for the underdog has been a passion for Debra Katz for as long as she can remember. Years before she would go on to win awards for her work as a civil rights attorney and represent Christine Blasey Ford in one of the nation’s most high-profile… Read more »
Shalva Band with Eurovision Host Bar Refaeli
An emotional performance by the Shalva Band at Thursday’s Eurovision Song Contest semifinal earned widespread praise from viewers in Israel and abroad, who hailed the band for its message of inclusivity and acceptance. Last Thursday, the Shalva Band, as guest artists, performed the song A Million Dreams”. Following their… Read more »
Nancy and Stuart Mellan and their blended family at their 1992 wedding. (Photo courtesy Nancy Mellan)
The Father’s Day Council Tucson is holding its 25th Annual Fathers of Year Awards Gala next month, and the Jewish Federation’s Stuart Mellan is among the honorees. Mellan, JFSA president and CEO, is one of seven men who will be celebrated on June 1 for their success in combining… Read more »
Filmmaker Judy Ben-Asher and her Truthseeker alter-ego, Jude. (Photo courtesy Judy Ben-Asher)
Documentaries, feature films, and animation in production by native Tucsonan Judy Ben-Asher’s Starry Sky Films focus on her discoveries about health and wellness. “These are all passion projects with the cohesive thread to uplift and educate, resolve misinformation, and find answers,” she says. The “Truthseeker®” documentary film follows Ben-Asher’s… Read more »
Ester Leutenberg with her latest mental health facilitator workbooks
Mitchell A. Leutenberg had a mental illness. The first time he tried to die by suicide, he asked his parents not to tell anyone. He died at his fourth attempt eight years later in 1986. He was 30 years old. In the years since, Mitchell’s mother, Ester Leutenberg, has… Read more »
Ellen Melamed instructs University of Arizona College of Medicine students on tools to build empathetic relationships with future patients. (Photo: Michelle Doggett/ UA College of Humanities)
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, left, and Sean Cronin after a Reveille Men’s Chorus outreach performance in November. (Photo courtesy Ari Slater)
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 »
Collaborating to strengthen security in Tucson’s Jewish community are, (L-R) Graham Hoffman, president and CEO, Jewish Community Foundation of Southern Arizona; Paul Patterson, Jewish community security director; and Stuart Mellan, president and CEO, Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona. (Photo courtesy Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona)
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 »
A photograph from June 30, 1948 shows Great Britain handing the port of Haifa to the Israel Defense Forces, with a formation of naval officers raising the flags of Israel and the Israeli navy for the first time in the port. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion is seen at left, with his wife Paula. (Kedem Auction House)
(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 »
Orthodox Jewish men walk through the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, Feb. 25, 2019. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
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 »
Nobuki Sugihara, second from left with Limmud FSU founder Chaim Chesler and villagers from Mir, Belarus on May 2, 2019. (Boris Brumin)
(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 »
Tech whiz Asher Dale, second from right, hikes with friends in the Negev Desert during his gap year in Israel. (Courtesy of Dale)
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 »
Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the first clinician to suggest a link between autism in children and the triple vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella, in London, Jan. 28, 2010. He spoke at a rally in Monsey, N.Y., May 13, 2019. (Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
(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 »
Participants in the March of Dignity gather in Kiev's Maidan Independence Square for ceremonies marking the first anniversary of the Maidan Revolution that led to the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovic, Feb. 22, 2015. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
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 »
Children play musical instruments during the celebration of Hanukkah at the Kharkiv Choral Synagogue, in Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine, Dec. 5, 2018. (Vyacheslav Madiyevskyy/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
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 »
A new site offers mourners a way to have someone say Kaddish for their loved ones. (Screenshot from kaddish.com)
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 »
