Tagged FRONT

(JTA) — One-year-old Vidal doesn’t know the significance behind the lullaby his father sings him at bedtime. He knows it helps him fall asleep, but not that the Ladino song is part of an effort to teach him what served as the lingua franca of Sephardi Jews of the… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) – The day after the presidential election, as congregants gathered in her Brooklyn synagogue to air their feelings, Rabbi Rachel Timoner was already starting to organize against the incoming administration. She called her local city councilman, Democrat Brad Lander, and together they organized an activists’ panel… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) – Shahaf Ben-Yakov always found it maddening when her ability as a combat soldier was questioned just because of her gender. Nonetheless, she dismissed as nonsense the notion that army service “has driven our girls crazy” — as a rabbi who runs a pre-military academy in… Read more »

(JTA) — When Cincinnati’s Mayerson Jewish Community Center was hit with a bomb threat on Jan. 18, Adam Bellows was satisfied with how the staff handled the preschool kids, including his two-year-old son. The kids, said Bellows, had no idea the threat had happened. They were evacuated and taken… Read more »

(JTA) — The “fear itself” thing? FDR was on to something. The rash of JCC bomb threats and cemetery desecrations, combined with a general sense that the country is becoming more intolerant, has Jews on edge in ways they haven’t been in years. The head of a… Read more »

Doctors should be more like gardeners than mechanics, says physician, author and historian Victoria Sweet, M.D., Ph.D. An advocate of “slow medicine,” she believes patients’ well-being can become a casualty of today’s emphasis on high-tech, high-pressure medical care. Sweet will be the keynote speaker at the Eighth Annual Cindy… Read more »

The Jewish History Museum/Holocaust History Center hosted its first naturalization ceremony on Friday, Feb. 17. Barbara Brumer, board president of the Jewish History Museum/Holocaust History Center, was one of the 26 people who became a United States citizen that day. The setting was perfect for this type of… Read more »

The kosher consumer is both blessed and inundated by the multitude of kosher certification labels and symbols available today, says Rabbi Israel Becker of Congregation Chofetz Chayim and the Southwest Torah Institute. Even more intriguing, there are hundreds of food products that are kosher even without a kosher label.… Read more »

Dina Gold grew up hearing her grandmother’s tales of the glamorous life in Berlin she led before the Nazis came to power, and her dreams of recovering a huge building she claimed belonged to the family, though she had no papers to prove ownership. Gold will speak about her… Read more »

The advisory council of the Women’s Philanthropy of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona will present the 11th annual Bryna Zehngut Mitzvot Award, recognizing an outstanding Jewish teenage girl, to Zoe Holtzman on March 5 at the Women’s Philanthropy “Connections” brunch. The council, which includes past Women’s Philanthropy chairs… Read more »

Raised in a kosher household, vegan Sunny Anne Holliday enjoys all of the dishes served in her restaurant, Lovin’ Spoonfuls — including country fried chicken, spaghetti and meatballs and cheeseburgers. Huh? Everything on the menu is meat- and dairy-free, says Holliday, but her savory dishes and decadent bakery items,… Read more »

“Life has a way of pulling us from our essence, our center. Sometimes it is simply everyday routines and distractions that grind us down, taking us on a path we do not want to travel. When this happens, we may feel a bit lost, aimless, overwhelmed or even ‘burned… Read more »

The joy of Purim commemorates the survival of the Jewish people from a plot to annihilate them in ancient Persia, as recorded in the Megillah, the Book of Esther. But the joy goes beyond the events of ancient times. Jews have survived over and over again, in a world… Read more »

The Tucson Jewish Community Center was on lockdown for about 90 minutes Monday evening after a caller claimed there were explosives set to go off in the parking lot. The call was part of the latest wave of bomb threats targeting JCCs and other Jewish institutions across the country… Read more »

LAS VEGAS (JTA) – Republican Jews have President Donald Trump to thank for their party’s renewed dominance of Washington politics. So what do they think of him? Marlyn Appelbaum paused to contemplate the question at the opening of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s confab at the Venetian resort hotel here… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The race to lead the Democratic National Committee is nothing if not granular. Among the leading candidates Tom Perez, the former labor secretary, says “every ZIP code counts.” Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, touts his “50 plus” states strategy. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.,… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — The group at the forefront of “resisting the Trump agenda” started in the middle of December with a single document circulated among friends. One that was “poorly formatted” and “full of typos,” in the words of one of its authors, Leah Greenberg. As of this… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) – Noah Roth likes to recall two moments from Israeli marathons in which he’s raced: a competitor in Jerusalem breezing by him in 2010 wearing all-black, haredi Orthodox garb but for a white athletic shirt; and a Russian woman on this city’s Allenby Street who… Read more »

(Kveller via JTA) — When I explain Purim to those less familiar with the holiday, I tell them it’s kind of like Jewish Halloween. Not so much because of the history and story behind each (Purim has no ghosts), but related to the joyful spirit, costumes, food and fun.… Read more »

(JTA) — Was that so hard? At some point in the past week, it looked like President Donald Trump was never going to use “anti-Semitism” in a sentence. It took a fourth series of hoax bomb threats at JCCs around the country and imprecations from Jewish groups across the… Read more »