Rabbi Jill Jacobs is the CEO of T’ruah, a rabbinic human rights organization representing over 2,300 rabbis and cantors and their communities in North America.
Jill Jacobs
By Jill Jacobs
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Opinion Bush Tax Cuts, Meet Rabbi Kalonymus
One of the major questions in this election cycle has been whether the tax cuts enacted by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 will be extended. These tax cuts include some relief for middle-class tax payers, but they primarily benefit the wealthiest two percent of Americans — those earning more than $250,000 a…
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Opinion A Case For Shaping Civil Society With Jewish Law
The poster took my breath away: “The divine throne will not be complete until the idolatry of Zionism is uprooted. May it be Your will that we will soon be able to say, ‘Blessed is the One who has uprooted idolatry.’” I was not in Ramallah, but in Mea Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox enclave of West…
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Opinion Bringing Judaism Out of the Home, and Into the Public Square
‘Be a Jew in the home and a man [sic] in the street.” These words by the 19th-century Lithuanian Jewish poet Judah Leib Gordon became a rallying cry for the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. With this slogan, Gordon urged Jews to keep their religious rituals in their homes and synagogues, while wearing modern clothes, pursuing…
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Opinion When the Slumlords Are Us
Thirty human households, and countless rodents and cockroaches: Those were the census figures in the apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side where I lived for about five years. When a neighbor living in a rent-stabilized unit complained that the gaping holes in her walls allowed rats to run free through her apartment, the landlord…
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Opinion Non-Zero Sum: Helping Others And Ourselves
Should Jews first take care of our own, or first serve the needs of society as a whole? In the course of a meandering and much-discussed article in the latest issue of Commentary magazine, historian Jack Wertheimer of the Jewish Theological Seminary castigates the Jewish social justice world for prioritizing support for non-Jews over the…
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Culture Next Time, Let’s Teach Social Justice in an Effective Way
Once a year, the eighth graders at a synagogue I’ll call Temple Beth Torah spend an afternoon volunteering at a soup kitchen. During the bus ride to the site, the teacher passes out a Talmudic quote about feeding the hungry and spends a few minutes trying to engage the students in conversation about the passage….
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Opinion Coming Up Short on the Tzedakah Yardstick
This month, Americans will sift through the countless solicitations in our mail and e-mail in order to decide where to give donations before the end-of-year tax-deduction deadline. Americans are often said to be the most generous people in the world, based on the percentage of the national gross domestic product that goes toward charitable causes….
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Culture Saving the World, One Jew at a Time
Spiritual Activism: A Jewish Guide to Leadership and Repairing the World By Rabbi Avraham Weiss Jewish Lights Publishing, 224 pages, $24.99. Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. & the Jewish Community By Rabbi Marc Schneier Jewish Lights Publishing, 240 pages, $18.99. As a rabbi who has devoted her career to social and economic justice, I…
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