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.
Americans overwhelmingly continue to side with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a Pew foreign policy survey shows — except for Millennials are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians. The survey, published earlier this month showed that a decade ago, Americans across the generations held similar views on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Not any more. Today, Millennials…
More than 100 men and women converted to Judaism in Madagascar this month, a historic first for the large island nation off the southeast coast of Africa. The May conversions, organized by Kulanu, a volunteer-run American nonprofit founded in the 1990s to support “isolated and emerging Jewish communities” worldwide, was the product of years of…
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday that he wanted to pass a bill that would make it easier for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to seek justice from their abusers as adults. By bowing to repeated calls by victims and advocates, Cuomo’s comments seem to remove a roadblock to the reform measure — although…
I found Rabbi Shulem Korn in Queens as he was assembling one of his famous Torah Trucks. A white pickup was hooked to an ornately decorated trailer, a dramatic scene of Mount Sinai, surrounded by lightening, emblazoned on the side. I’d been trying to track down the rabbi for months, celebrated in New York for…
A Togolese man, calling himself a king and descendant of an ancient Lost Tribe, has gained prominent Orthodox allies in Israel and even held a meeting with the Minister of Religious Affairs to request his people be recognized as a Lost Tribe of Israel. Francois A. Ayi, who describes himself as belonging to “one of…
In the 1950s, if you asked your rabbi about kidney donation, he would have been unsure about what Jewish law said about the procedure. To be on the safe side, he might have said it was forbidden. Now, rabbis are more likely to call it a mitzvah. The shift over the past decades has to…
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has dodged repeated entreaties from advocates against child sexual abuse to support legislation that would enable many victims of this crime to seek justice from their abusers. In a May 9 statement, Cuomo sidestepped pointed questions from the advocates, and from the press, about his willingness to push the state…
On the eve of Donald J. Trump’s win in Indiana — and emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee — two of the country’s major Orthodox magazines boasted exclusive interviews with the presidential hopeful. Ami Magazine and Mispacha, Orthodox weeklies printed in Israel and the United States, carried cover stories of the business magnate and Republican…
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