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Guess which faith group is most likely to be vaccinated?
As public health experts fret over a stalling COVID-19 vaccine campaign in the U.S., a new survey suggests they don’t have to worry about American Jews. Jews have the lowest levels of vaccine “hesitancy” of any religious group in the country, according to a report released Tuesday by the Public Religion Research Institute, with 85%…
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Is ‘My Unorthodox Life’ bad for the Jews? Hollywood Jews weigh in
The new Netflix reality show “My Unorthodox Life,” which depicts the life and family of Julia Haart, a formerly Orthodox woman who left her community and now runs a top modeling agency, is generating discomfort, debate, and some loud objections about the nature of Jewish and Orthodox representation on-screen. But Elon Gold, for one, would…
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Are the anti-BDS laws aimed at Ben & Jerry’s constitutional?
The Arkansas Times, a small monthly in Little Rock, hasn’t written a single article about Ben & Jerry’s recent decision to end sales in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Yet despite running a newspaper that he called “about as local and provincial as you can be,” publisher Alan Leveritt is at the center of a legal…
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LA teachers working to quash a union BDS vote say they’re winning
An intense campaign to derail a Los Angeles teachers’ union resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is working, say members of Jewish groups that banded together to defeat it. Pressure from the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, the Anti-Defamation League and a host of other Jewish groups will likely mean the union will…
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Faux pets help Holocaust survivors stave off loneliness
Gerda Weissfeld’s faux poodle sat in her lap and barked as she pet him. “You’re a good boy,” Weissfeld, 102, told the beige-and-white puppy as he continued to bark, seemingly in response to her touch. “He is an intelligent doggy. I call him Peter,” she said. “Sometimes you think he’s real.” Weissfeld, Great Neck, L.I.,…
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They helped build Israel’s first baseball field. Now their son is pitching at the Olympics.
The cheering from Kibbutz Gezer is going to be so loud that Alon Leichman may hear it as he takes to the mound in Tokyo as a pitcher for Team Israel’s baseball team. That’s because his proud parents – David Leichman and Rabbi Miri Gold – will be shouting and clapping along with other family…
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Why San Francisco is home to the world’s oldest Jewish film festival
Just a few years ago, at a gathering of filmmakers during the annual Berlin Film Festival, I was asked by a perplexed newcomer to the festival scene why the oldest and largest Jewish film festival in the world took place in, of all places, San Francisco. As a native-born San Francisco Jew and a former…
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A 76-year-old Jewish philanthropist from Los Angeles is one of the world’s most prolific Olympic pin traders
(JTA) — Sid Marantz loves tradition so much that he spent 20 years as a board member of his family’s Los Angeles synagogue. So it’s a big deal that he isn’t in Tokyo this week for the start of the Olympics, the first Summer Games he’s missed since 1984. Marantz usually attends for three weeks:…
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Synagogues made COVID-safe High Holiday plans. Then came Delta.
(JTA) — The leadership team at Ikar, a synagogue in Los Angeles, had just begun planning to move their services indoors. They had gone through a year of virtual services followed by several months of outdoor services for members vaccinated against COVID-19. Then the Delta variant hit. Now the synagogue, like many across the country,…
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Remembering Ruth Pearl, mother of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, and ‘strength incarnate’
Ruth Pearl, who died July 20 at the age of 85, fought a thousand battles in her lifetime. She didn’t look like a warrior— barely five feet tall, rail thin with cropped brown hair and a soft voice that quavered, especially as she fought respiratory problems in later life. But when I first met her,…
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Bay Area man arrested with weapons wanted ‘whites-only’ community without Jews
A 32-year-old Los Gatos man who police say carried a cache of weapons and high-capacity magazines in his pickup truck, along with a journal bearing racist and antisemitic writings, expressed “an idea of setting up a community with only whites,” his lawyer described in a court filing set for a hearing this week. Wesley Martines…
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