Earlier this month, when 90-year-old Fran Goldman walked six miles through the snow to get her vaccine, she didn’t think much of it. “I’m not an attention grabber,” Goldman, a member of Seattle’s Temple Beth Am, said in an interview this weekend. “I did not think it was a big deal.” But her story was…
(JTA) — As the leader of British Jewry’s main human rights group, Mia Hasenson-Gross regularly hears personal stories of loss, grief and helplessness. But few encounters have affected Hasenson-Gross as profoundly as the one she had in 2019 with Rahima Mahmut, a U.K.-based activist for the rights of Uighurs, a Muslim minority that is the…
(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Keshira haLev Fife is well known in the Jewish community of her native Pittsburgh, where she conducts Shabbat services and Hebrew school classes. But she’s not your average prayer leader or educator. As a self-described “proud Jewish woman of color,” she said she “sprinkles, sparkles, disrupts expectations and…
At his fourth shiva of the last month, Yona Lunger struggled to think of a time when he had seen a person tear both sides of their clothing for the mourning ritual of kriah, as he had done after the coronavirus killed his mother, father, sister and brother-in-law within the span of 32 days. The…
Andrew Yang, one of the leading candidates in the New York City mayoral race, was confronted during a campaign stop in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn on Saturday about his opposition to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. In an OpEd for the Forward last month, Yang described the BDS movement as “rooted in…
Last June, a San Mateo City Council member of Asian and Jewish heritage had a rock thrown through her window at home. The incident, which is still under investigation by police, came after the coronavirus pandemic sparked a slew of anti-Asian signs and slogans, some reading “F** China,” “Chinese Disease” and “Thanks China.” Eight months…
Purim has often been dubbed the “Jewish Halloween.” For Jeremy Sarnat, last year’s holiday was particularly scary. Friends in his Atlanta neighborhood were delivering the traditional festive food baskets and he was afraid to open them. It was in the very early days of the pandemic when epidemiologists were still honing in on how the…
Amid the record cold snap that has blanketed swaths of Texas in snow and cut power across the state, an Orthodox synagogue came to the rescue when a local hospital couldn’t keep their COVID-19 vaccines at the required extremely low temperatures. Houston’s Methodist Hospital had received a thousand doses of the drug, but an electrical…
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said Thursday that he “felt a tremendous sense of history and responsibility” in leading the second impeachment case against former President Donald Trump, and still feels “we should have gotten 100 votes” to convict. But Raskin expressed no regrets about how the trial unfolded, and shifted focus to the group…
It’s incredibly difficult to fully explain what it feels like to be in Texas right now. For one, I’m not sure which hat I’m wearing. I’m a homeowner, wife, and mother, so obviously I’m concerned about my family and the place I live. But I’m also a local resident who cares about community. So I’m…
Shortly after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York managed to enrage much of the Jewish community with a single tweet. After witnessing a large funeral in the Orthodox neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last April, de Blasio warned “the Jewish community, and all communities” that police would…
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