Tagged HEADLINES

SAN FRANCISCO (J. The Jewish News of Northern California via JTA) — Breaking religious barriers is nothing new for Rabbi Daniel Lehmann. Ordained at New York’s Yeshiva University, the flagship of Modern Orthodoxy, he most recently was president of Hebrew College near Boston, which is devoted to pluralistic Jewish… Read more »

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(JTA) — On June 11, the Knesset’s official no smoking day, the Likud party’s Yehudah Glick announced that he was embarking on a hunger strike until the body passed a tax on loose tobacco equal to the tax on cigarettes. Glick’s dramatic gesture was a sign of a seldom-discussed crisis… Read more »

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) – In the compact, open kitchen of the apartment here that Dalit Gvirtsman shares with her husband, about a dozen women are jostling for space. One is chopping tomatoes, another is sauteing onions and another is squeezing a few dollops of honey into cooked egg noodles.… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — When Adam Ferziger wants to describe the “deteriorating” relationship between American and Israeli Jews, he reaches back to a 2,000-year-old divide. “To use a metaphor, we have a contemporary Jerusalem and Babylon kind of dynamic,” said Ferziger, a history and contemporary Jewry professor at Bar-Ilan University in Tel… Read more »

(JTA) — On June 10, 2002, Charles Krauthammer delivered the Distinguished Rennert Lecture upon receiving the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University’s Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies. Below is an excerpt from the lecture titled “He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace.”  In the 1990s, America slept and… Read more »

Alma Hernandez, a Mexican-American Jew and daughter of immigrants, is running for the Arizona House of Representatives and founded a progressive Jewish group in Tucson. (Courtesy of Hernandez)

(JTA) — When Mary McCabe explains America’s immigration courts to children who have been separated from their parents, she tries to make it interactive. She draws a sketch of a courtroom and asks kids to identify the figures in the room — like the judge or the lawyers —… Read more »

AMSTERDAM (JTA) — More than 70 years have passed since Meijer van der Sluis first laid eyes on the love of his life. He was at a home for child survivors of the Holocaust, and he opened the door for her. He still remembers her short haircut and exactly… Read more »

TEL AVIV (JTA) — Tel Aviv has been decked out in rainbow flags for weeks. Suddenly, it seems, every restaurant, coffee shop and store is super “gay friendly.” The city’s Pride Parade is traditionally held on the second Friday of June. Fifteen years ago, estimates were that 9,000 people… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — Growing up in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York, as the son of an African-American mother who converted to Judaism and a white Ashkenazi father who became religious later in life, Isaiah Rothstein knows what it’s like not to fit in. The New York hamlet… Read more »

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Halie Soifer says her transition from national security expert to political operative started with a crisis of violence: the deadly neo-Nazi march last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soifer says the march, which culminated in a car-ramming attack on counterprotesters that killed one and injured at least 20,… Read more »

By Ben Sales NEW YORK (JTA) — The Orthodox Union released a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s policy of separating the families of illegal immigrants after they cross the U.S. border. The statement came one day after the O.U., an umbrella Orthodox group, hosted a speech by Attorney General… Read more »

(JTA) — “Ethics of the Fathers” includes this bold advice from Rabbi Yishmael: “When we learn in order to act, we become learners, teachers, preservers and doers.” So many Jewish institutions are asking how they might engage younger people, raise a new generation of leaders and appeal across age groups.… Read more »

In an essay for JTA on Michael Chabon’s intermarriage views, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer describe a “left camp” that argues for greater acceptance, welcoming and inclusion of the intermarried and their family members, and a “Jewish right” that argues for holding on to distinctions… Read more »

Anthony Bourdain at the Whitby Hotel in New York, July 17, 2017.

Anthony Bourdain was quick — and often willing — to publicly offer his own flaws. “Until 44 years of age, I never had any kind of savings account,” Bourdain said in 2017. “ always owed money. I’d always been selfish and completely irresponsible.” Despite or maybe because of such… Read more »

(The Nosher via JTA) – Babka is an Eastern European yeasted cake with deep Jewish roots and also great American popularity. One of babka’s most notorious moments was in an episode of “Seinfeld”:  Jerry and Elaine head to Royal Bakery to pick up babka for a dinner party, and… Read more »

TRNAVA, Slovakia (JTA) — Growing up, Robert Sajtlava remembers playing near what used to be his native city’s Orthodox Synagogue. A rectangular structure with a deceptively unimpressive facade, its ornate ceiling and interior walls suffered extensive damage from the precipitation leaking through the roof and, occasionally, by trespassers who… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — A proposal to overhaul the conversion system in Israel would remove its control from the haredi Orthodox-dominated Chief Rabbinate. The chief rabbis of Israel and dozens of haredi and religious Zionist rabbis are objecting to the plan, which recommends the establishment of a new state-run Orthodox… Read more »

(JTA) — Jewish converts in America may have a much harder time being accepted in Israel because of a new set of regulations proposed by Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. If adopted, some activists in Israel say, the new guidelines for religious courts could drive a deeper wedge between Israel and… Read more »

(JTA) — A bill that would ban teenagers under 18 from marrying in New Jersey has been stalled because of opposition from the state’s haredi Orthodox community. Agudath Israel of America, the national haredi organization, says it supports the bill but that its provisions are too strict. Citing child… Read more »