Growing up, one of my favorite foods was my mom’s Shepherd’s Pie. It was a great comfort food, perfect for a blustery fall day, or a Shabbat dinner in February. I loved Shepherd’s Pie so much that when I went milchigetarian my mom took mercy on me and made up a vegetarian version of her…
FREE SPEECH AND FOUR-LETTER WORDS ON MENU AT NATIONAL COALITION AGAINST CENSORSHIP AWARDS DINNER The National Coalition Against Censorship’s executive director, Joan Berlin, reminded the crowd gathered for the organization’s recent event that George Orwell had famously written that telling the truth in difficult times is a revolutionary act. At the October 21 “Free Speech…
Barack Obama will move forward with his domestic agenda with the son of a former Israeli resistance fighter as his first appointment and second-in-command. Rahm Emanuel, a Jewish congressman from Chicago and former Clinton White House staffer, accepted the post, which will put him in charge of implementing Obama’s policies. That will make him the…
The Jewish support for Barack Obama’s historic election showed that despite lengthy and expensive efforts by Republicans, Jews remained a solid Democratic constituency, willing to vote in record numbers for a candidate who had to earn their backing. Initial exit polls indicated that around 78% of Jews voted for Obama for president, higher than the…
Demarest, N.J. — As polls closed in New Jersey on election night, the family of Dennis Shulman, a Democrat who ran for Congress in the state’s northernmost district, gathered around the television set — to cheer for Barack Obama. The results had not come in yet for Shulman, a blind psychoanalyst and rabbi with no…
Postville, Iowa — In developments that are already crippling the availability of kosher beef in large parts of America, three of the nation’s five largest slaughterhouses producing kosher beef halted production in the first week of November. All eyes have been on the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse, here in Iowa, which stopped producing beef last…
Postville, Iowa — In the days before the nation’s largest kosher meat company filed for bankruptcy, the company’s slaughterhouse here in northeast Iowa gradually shut down its operations, leaving angry workers without salaries or places to live, and animals caged and dying. Around town, men and women who had come to work at the Agriprocessors…
Los Angeles, Calif. — With California Jews lining up on either side of a heated gay marriage debate, those opposed to gay nuptials were vindicated November 5 when a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage passed by a narrow margin. Proposition 8, which calls for amending California’s state constitution to define marriage as solely between a…
Washington — During Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, his foreign policy advisers were criticized by some in the Jewish community for not being sufficiently supportive of Israel. But president-elect Obama’s foreign policy team is shaping up to be centrist and pragmatic, strong on Israel and likely to use special envoys to deal with overseas conflicts….
Like many Jewish kids of bar and bat mitzvah age, the eighth graders at the Rodeph Sholom School in Manhattan have been asked in recent months to consider their own religious beliefs as preparation for their entry into religious adulthood. Unlike most, however, they took a field trip to a historic synagogue to see celebrity…
Washington — Armenian activists are crying foul over Turkey’s hiring of a Jewish lobbyist to work against the recognition of the Armenian genocide. Noam Neusner, former chief speechwriter on policy issues for President Bush and White House liaison to the Jewish community, was hired by the government of Turkey to promote strong ties with major…
