Josh Tapper
By Josh Tapper
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News Cuba’s Jews Survived Fidel Castro’s Rule — Now They Face Life Without Him
Fidel Castro died Saturday at age 90. The former Cuban strongman was nothing if not a controversial figure — a socialist hero to some, a heartless dictator to many others. His relationship to the island’s small Jewish community — now just 1,500, down from a peak of 15,000 — was also far from clear-cut. On…
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Fast Forward Tiny Iowa Town’s Jews Bounce Back After Agriprocessors Raid
POSTVILLE, Iowa (JTA) – On a frigid evening late last month, Aron Schimmel, the Chabad emissary here, sat in a deli at the back of the glatt kosher supermarket sipping from a can of Israeli mango juice. A sign posted next to the entranceway boasted of the presence of Jewish life in this working-class town…
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Fast Forward Bernie Sanders’ Jewishness a Non-Issue in Iowa — or So Voters Claim
SIOUX CITY, Iowa (JTA) — On a frigid night in what has been an unusually cold winter here, Bernie Sanders packed more than 1,200 people into the resplendent Orpheum Theatre, a nearly 90-year-old venue in this western Iowa outpost across the Missouri River from Nebraska. After taking the stage late Tuesday night, the independent Vermont…
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Fast Forward Will Justin Trudeau Change Canada’s Policy on Israel?
The election of Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau as prime minister represents the since Stephen Harper and his Conservatives assumed power in 2006. What is unlikely to change, however, is Ottawa’s robust support for Israel — a policy cemented under Harper, whose forceful backing of the Jewish state earned him a reputation as one of…
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News 10 Years After Katrina, Struggles and Triumphs for New Orleans Jews
(JTA) — One rainy afternoon earlier this summer, Rabbi Gabe Greenberg stood on the backyard patio of the new Beth Israel synagogue telling the story of the deluge that destroyed the Orthodox congregation’s Lakeview neighborhood building. Most of the now 111-year-old synagogue’s possessions were ruined by the 10 feet of water that filled the premises…
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Culture What’s in an Old Dictionary? Plenty of Anti-Semitism.
When I was in my sophomore year of high school, I spent many of my lunch hours eating alone. I would sit on a knee-high bench in the locker room, in one of the music wing’s boxy practice rooms or at a table in the expansive domed cafeteria we called the Great Hall. Afterward I…
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Fast Forward Why Chabad Has No Presence in Cuba
(JTA) — On the freshly painted, salmon-colored walls of Alberto and Rebeca Meshulam’s apartment, two portraits of the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, frame the entranceway leading to a wide, airy vestibule. Miniatures of the same portrait sit atop a glass-covered countertop near an image of the Meshulams’ son, Moises, taken at the Chabad-Lubavitch…
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Fast Forward Daniel Libeskind Holocaust Monument Collects Dust in Toronto
(JTA) — Mere days after the Wheel of Conscience was unveiled in January 2011, it broke down — something that would happen to the Daniel Libeskind-designed Holocaust monument twice more within the year. In January 2012, the wheel broke again and was sent from its home at the Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, in…
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News DNA test kits spark a surge of online conversions to Judaism in the U.S.
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Culture RFK Jr.’s poems to Olivia Nuzzi are peak cringe — so were King Solomon’s
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Culture She was a dancer who leapt to the top of her field — then the Trump administration fired her
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Fast Forward Cory Booker has long embraced Jewish tradition. Now he has married a Jewish woman.
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Yiddish World New CD of Yiddish children’s songs by Vilna-born composer David Botwinik
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News Synagogue protests have shocked NYC and LA. This Michigan congregation has faced them for 22 years
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Opinion Israel has a crucial lesson to learn from apartheid South Africa. It isn’t what you think
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Fast Forward Lithuanian government party leader convicted of inciting hatred towards Jews
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