For many Jews, Purim may be the holiday when five-year-olds dress up like Queen Esther and 25-year-olds drink “until they can’t tell the difference between Mordechai and Haman,” but in recent years, the holiday has taken on a new meaning. For some, the story of Purim has come to embody the potential of the Jewish…
Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden’s nominee for attorney general, touted the integrity of Kristen Clarke, who was nominated for assistant attorney general, as he appeared before the Senate for his confirmation hearing on Monday. Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah brought up past comments made by Clarke, recently featured on conservative news websites, about…
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…
דאָס בוך איז גרונטיק געפֿאָרשט, לעבעדיק אָנגעשריבן — אָבער אידעאָלאָגיש באַפֿאַרבט
