Sam Kestenbaum is a contributing editor and former staff writer for the Forward. Before this, he worked for The New York Times and newsrooms in Sana, Ramallah and Beijing. Contact him at kestenbaum@forward.com and follow him on Twitter at @skestenbaum and on Instagram at @skestenbaum.
Organizers behind last summer’s deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia are being denied permits to hold a second rally on its anniversary next year. The original rally, which drew a large crowd of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, devolved into violence and resulted in the killing of one counter-protestor. The city of Charlottesville said…
While law enforcement agents were searching the Brooklyn home of Akayed Ullah, the would-be suicide attacker who had detonated a pipe bomb in a Manhattan subway on Monday, a Chabad husband and wife took the unusual opportunity to launch a “mitzvah campaign” in the neighborhood. Rabbi Yisrolik Langsam, who heads a Chabad outpost in the…
A group of “alt-right” white nationalist activists are banding together to form a new organization called Operation Homeland — making a bid to both further professionalize their movement and align themselves with the international “Identitarian” movement, a style of white nationalism with roots in the European far-right. Richard Spencer, one of the country’s foremost white…
On Saturday, thousands of Reform Jews gathered in a cavernous Boston auditorium, filling the space nearly to capacity. Congregational leaders led the crowd in prayer to celebrate the Jewish Sabbath. The scene of the stage was projected on four massive screens, amplifying the intimate rituals of the sacred day to the scale of a football…
Rev. William J. Barber II, a black minister and one of the country’s foremost progressive organizers, addressed a huge audience of Reform Jews on the opening night of the denomination’s biennial gathering — where he called on the Reform movement to join him in his newly-launched campaign to fight poverty. For many, Barber’s speech at…
Interfaith families may now be buried together in a cemetery plot belonging to Congregation B’nai Israel, a Conservative synagogue in the coastal New Jersey town of Toms River. “There are always questions about burial of non-Jewish spouses in our cemetery,” Glenn Jacobs, a member of the synagogue’s cemetery committee told the website Patch.com, “and some…
Jewish weddings are typically joyous events during which a couple’s family and friends gather to celebrate and shower them with love as they create a new life together. But on Sunday, three Israeli Jewish couples will turn their party into a protest, and their intimate moment into a public, political act. Temple Emanu-El, the iconic…
The organizer behind this summer’s explosive Unite The Right rally of white supremacists is planning an anniversary event next summer — seeking to cast himself as a “political dissident” standing up for civil rights. Jason Kessler, who spearheaded August’s explosive event, announced this week that he’s drafting plans for the one-year anniversary of the original…
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