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How a rabbi suspended for sexual misconduct can stay in the pulpit
Rabbi Jeremy Gerber acknowledged sexual transgressions. His synagogue decided to keep him.
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His great-grandparents found refuge in China. Now this Canadian Jew is starting for its hockey team.
Most of Ethan Werek’s teammates on the Chinese Olympic hockey team had never met a Jewish person before he joined the roster. But Werek’s family tree was once planted in Chinese soil. Like the six athletes suiting up for Israel in this year’s games, Werek didn’t need to be born in the country on his…
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At Lipstadt’s long-delayed confirmation hearing, Republicans double down on holding it up
Seven months after Deborah E. Lipstadt was nominated to serve as the nation’s antisemitism envoy, Senate Republicans defended their holdup of her confirmation hearing, which took place Tuesday. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin accused Lipstadt of engaging in the “malicious poison” of hatred for a tweet in which she accused him of white supremacy for…
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‘I welcomed a terrorist into my congregation’: 5 takeaways from Rabbi Charlie’s testimony to Congress
Less than a month after Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker escaped a hostage standoff at his Texas synagogue, he will appear virtually on Capitol Hill Tuesday to champion a federal program that helps vulnerable nonprofits bolster their security. Gratitude is a major theme of his testimony, appearing eight times in a copy of his prepared remarks, which…
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How do Jewish groups welcome Afghan refugees? With a Muslim caseworker.
When a refugee family arrived from Afghanistan to their first apartment in Chicago, a case worker from a local Jewish social services agency was there to welcome them. His name? Abdul. The family was overwhelmed to see their new home fully furnished. As the older boys helped with suitcases, the young daughter ran from room…
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‘Sledgehammer:’ Trump’s ambassador to Israel hits hard in new memoir
Even before he was confirmed as U.S. Ambassador to Israel in 2017, David Friedman tangled with Democrats, calling members of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street “kapos” and questioning long-held U.S. support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In his new memoir, Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer and campaign advisor to Donald Trump before…
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Jewish nonprofits look to feds, states to help pay for security. But there’s not enough grant money to go around.
Note: This story has been updated to reflect more recent events. After he took a job leading a synagogue in Bakersfield, California, in May of 2020, Rabbi Jonathan Klein realized his community was vulnerable. Temple Beth El didn’t have much in the way of protection, and the rabbi worried about extremists, including the Ku Klux…
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Hailing from Colleyville and Charlottesville, Lipstadt’s Senate guests will highlight recent antisemitism
When Deborah E. Lipstadt arrives Tuesday at her confirmation hearing to be the nation’s next special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, she will be accompanied by Jewish women who evoke two shocking recent incidents of anti-Jewish hatred — last month’s hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue and the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in…
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‘Be kind’: Rabbi Doug Goldhamer, founder of first synagogue for the deaf, dies at 76
When Rabbi Douglas Goldhamer arrived in Chicago from Cincinnati in the early 1970s, he found deaf Jews attending church services because they had no synagogue to accommodate their needs or view them as equals. So in 1973, Goldhamer founded Congregation Bene Shalom, a Reform synagogue in Skokie, Illinois, that interprets all of its services in…
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Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein, who fought Holocaust deniers, dies
Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein, who died Jan. 28, at 95, was a modest, unprepossessing man. Whatever celebrity he achieved in life — winning a historic legal campaign against Holocaust deniers, seeing his life dramatized in a television movie starring Leonard Nimoy — he used to further the greater goal of keeping alive the memories of…
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No ‘Super Jewish’ district, but increased Orthodox influence in New York’s capital
Orthodox leaders are welcoming newly drawn lines that could for the first time give a member of the upstate New York community a shot at a seat in the state legislature. A new Rockland County district is the good news for Orthodox Jews looking for more representation in Washington and Albany, where the Democratically controlled…
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