A prominent TikTok user with 1 million followers committed to do teshuvah, Hebrew for atonement, after Shekhiynah Larks of Oakland posted a video urging him to do so. TikTok user George Lee says he unknowingly “liked” an antisemitic video that disparaged Holocaust victim Anne Frank. The video was made by the Black Hammer Organization, a…
When Cantor Ilana Plutzer was serving as a chaplain at Rikers Island a few years ago, she went to the kitchen to get grape juice for Jews in the jail who said they were not getting it with Shabbat meals as they were promised. Plutzer said a kitchen worker told her they did not have…
(JTA) — Former President Trump’s impeachment defense team intends to argue that his infamous Jan. 6 speech, in which he exhorted his followers to “fight like hell” and march “to the Capitol,” was permitted by his First Amendment rights to free speech. Political opponents are already calling reference to the well-known Supreme Court decision (Schenck v. United…
Walk by Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Harlem and you’ll notice something interesting. A Star of David can be seen atop each of the four fluted Ionic columns at the main entrance, leaving a subtle trace that it was once used a synagogue. It’s a familiar story often told in cities both large and small…
Norm Eisen, the Constitutional lawyer who served as House counsel in the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, said he lives by three rules his immigrant parents taught him: always be loyal, always do the right thing no matter the cost, and always serve the best hamburger you can. His immigrant parents ran a…
Read this article in Yiddish Flory Jagoda, the Sarajevo-born Holocaust survivor and Sephardic musician who brought Ladino music to the wider world died last month at the age of 97. Jagoda was a lifelong lover of her native-langauge, Ladino. To many, she is the first name which comes to mind when thinking of Sephardic and…
Fed up with what they describe as concessions to “right-wing interest groups” and “pro-Israel lobbyists,” the originators of California’s ethnic studies model curriculum for high schools are now demanding their names be stripped from the final draft. The announcement Tuesday by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, one of the co-chairs of the advisory committee that oversaw the drafting…
Editor’s Note: This story will be updated as necessary. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space laser post shot her into the Jewish press; there was just too much there, comedic and serious, to give it up. While the statement was made before her election, she has refused to apologize for her comments, according to CNN. Antisemitism…
(JTA) — The conversation around Donald Kraft’s Shabbat dinner table was always wide ranging and unpredictable. Some weeks he would marvel at the wonders of a granddaughter’s high school calculator. Other times it might be the latest columns by Mike Royko and Erma Bombeck or the old Israeli oil lamps he collected along with fossils,…
From a young age, Darby Leigh knew he was on a spiritual path. Fascinated by religion and spiritual practices, he thought about becoming a rabbi but quickly dismissed it, for one main reason: He is profoundly deaf. Today, Leigh is rabbi of Congregation Kerem Shalom in Concord, Massachusetts — and at the forefront of creating…
Since screening for Tay-Sachs began in the 1970s, the number of Ashkenazi Jews born with the rare inherited disease that destroys nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord has plummeted by 90 percent worldwide. Now, JScreen, a non-profit organization associated with the Department of Genetics at Emory University in Atlanta, is trying to replicate…
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