Rebecca Spence
By Rebecca Spence
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News Longtime Leader Breaks Glass Ceiling at Reform Seminary
In the late 1980s, Barbara Benioff Friedman sat in a meeting of the UJA-Federation of New York’s distribution committee and was appalled by what she heard: During a heated debate over which summer camps the charity should fund, a Reform Jewish woman stood up and argued that it was Orthodox camps that merited the dollars,…
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News Groups Flip Flop as Controversy Over Liberal Zionists Continues
The imbroglio surrounding a pro-Israel campus coalition and one of its member organizations, a left-wing student group accused of bringing Israel bashers to campuses, continued to deepen this past week with a dizzying series of retractions and reversals from all sides. The Israel on Campus Coalition, an alliance of 31 organizations working to promote Israel’s…
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News Poll: Conservative Leaders Back Gay Rabbis
An overwhelming majority of religious and lay leaders in the Conservative synagogue movement support gay rabbinical ordination and same-sex marriage, according to the results of a newly released survey. In another development likely to boost the push for gay ordination, the movement’s flagship institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, announced that Rabbi Daniel Nevins…
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News Coalition Votes Not To Toss Liberal Zionists
A coalition of pro-Israel organizations last week voted unanimously to retain the membership of a dovish Zionist student group accused of hosting Israel bashers on American campuses. On January 19, the steering committee of the Israel on Campus Coalition, which seeks to bolster Israel’s image at colleges and at universities, roundly rejected a move by…
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News Emergency Aid Pays for Arabic Lessons
American charitable dollars raised to aid war-torn areas in Israel are being used to teach Arabic to Jewish children. The Jewish Agency for Israel is partnering with the Abraham Fund Initiatives, an organization that advocates for equality between Jews and Arabs in Israel, to teach Arabic to Jewish children in the north of Israel. Both…
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News After Protests, Think Tank Taps Women
A prestigious Israeli institute, responding to a flap that erupted last summer when it failed to include women at a high-powered parley on the future of the Jewish people, has appointed three women to its board of directors. The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, a Jerusalem-based policy consortium, added to its board Morlie Levin, executive…
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News AJCongress Reverses Stance
The saga of the American Jewish Congress’s resignation from a pro-Israel campus coalition took a bizarre turn this week when the organization partly retracted its retraction of the resignation. After telling the Forward last week that a letter of resignation tendered to the Israel on Campus Coalition had been written by an assistant regional director…
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News Campus Coalition Split Over Progressive Union
As members of a coalition of pro-Israel organizations debate whether to oust a dovish Zionist student group accused of bringing Israel-bashers to American campuses, at least one national Jewish organization has already pulled out of the coalition in protest of the dovish group’s activities. The American Jewish Congress recently tendered its resignation from the Israel…
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