There are 115 tiny homes along the Arroyo Grande Freeway between Pasadena and Los Angeles that weren’t there a month ago. Each took 90 minutes to build, and together they will soon offer 230 unhoused people immediate shelter, food, and health and occupational services. Oh, and there’s an off-leash area and free veterinary care for…
The mandate from the headquarters of Conservative Judaism’s youth movement is clear: the unvaccinated can’t participate in national and regional events. But that requirement conflicts with anti-mandate laws of a dozen states, including Florida, Texas and Georgia. The result for hundreds of United Synagogue Youth staff and teens caught in the middle ranges from confusion…
Amid many gloomy predictions that American Jewry is shrinking, disengaging and assimilating, comes bracing news from Chicago: um, maybe not. A just-released Chicago Jewish population study — the largest one ever — found that the community is instead growing and diversifying: • The study shows that the Jewish population in Chicago is nearly 320,000, an…
The Sunrise Movement, best known for its support for the Green New Deal, distanced itself Thursday from its Washington, D.C. chapter’s boycott of a rally that included three Zionist Jewish groups. “As a national movement that supports freedom and dignity for all people, we will always welcome anyone who acts on our principles and chooses…
Update: The national Sunrise Movement distanced itself from its D.C. chapter on Thursday, but stopped short of condemning the boycott. The D.C. chapter of the environmentalist Sunrise Movement is declining to participate in a voting rights rally in Washington because three pro-Israel Jewish groups are included: the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the National Council…
Rabbi Jason Weiner, the senior rabbi at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, found himself on the front lines of the COVID-19 surge in Los Angeles in January. He still remembers the pain he felt when praying in the hospital rooms of those who had died from COVID, as body bags piled up in the hospital morgue….
Jewish inmates who request cheesecake for Shavuot must get it. That’s what a three-judge federal appeals court panel unanimously ruled last week in a lawsuit filed by two Jewish prisoners who held that the vegan meals the Michigan Department of Corrections served them did not fulfill their kosher dietary needs. Cheesecake was not in the…
A Chicago Jewish mother struggled in her relationship with her child’s father, but it wasn’t until she turned for help to a local Jewish agency that the reason became clear: she was a victim of domestic abuse. “For the first time, I felt heard and understood” said M., whose identity has been obscured for her…
Throughout the world, only about 60,000 people speak Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish. But the historic language of Sephardic Jewry is enjoying a bit of a renaissance. And what is believed to be the only print Ladino publication in the world, El Amaneser, reached a milestone last week when the Istanbul-based publication cranked out its 200th issue….
Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State and first Black person to hold the job, lived on the same South Bronx block as Norman and Amy Brash, friends “so close they were considered relatives,” and Powell called them “Mammele and Papelle.” “Don’t ask me why the Jewish diminutives,” Powell, who died Monday at 84,…
I did it all backward. Instead of taking my research trips before writing my book, like any normal historian would have, I’d waited. Only after I had completed my first draft of the book did I finally make my way to Lithuania and Vilna (now Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania during its brief moment of…
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