(JTA) – Fresh off cutting the locks off a closed Brooklyn playground, leaders in New York City’s Orthodox community are turning their attention to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ban on overnight camps, issued last week to keep the coronavirus pandemic in check. A lawsuit filed Thursday by the Association of Jewish Camp Operators, which represents dozens…
A red triangle. The number 14. The number 88. President Trump has again provided fodder for the critics who have accused him of using Nazi and anti-Semitic symbols to signal his sympathies with white nationalist supporters. His campaign posted the latest example on Facebook on Thursday: an ad featuring an inverted red triangle — used…
Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has never met Arkady Belozovsky. Yet their faces have appeared inches away from each other on millions of television screens daily for the last few months. Belozovsky, who came to New York 30 years ago as a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union, has provided American Sign Language…
(JTA)— Alan Hurwitz led a complicated life. He was a dedicated anti-racism activist who spent years advocating for desegregation. He was a military reserve veteran who became a middle school teacher. And he was a prolific bank robber who was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and spent two decades behind bars. Hurwitz, who died of…
Pro-Israel groups worried that Israel could lose an important ally have stepped up their support for New York Rep. Eliot Engel, but the national debate about race, as well as Engel’s unforced errors, put him in a weak position going into his primary on Tuesday. The election in Engel’s 16th Congressional District, which contains parts…
(JTA) – Against daunting odds, both historical and political, Eva Konrad Hawkins fulfilled her dream of becoming a scientist. At age 26, Konrad Hawkins fled her native Hungary with only the pack on her back, leaving her parents and brother behind to pursue her studies beyond what was available to her under the constraints of…
For Father’s Day, I recently spoke with Dena Schechter and Mel Levine about their father, Sid Levine, who died in 1995 at the age of 82. I had interviewed Sid years ago for the documentary, “Meet Me at Brooklyn & Soto,” about the East Los Angeles Jewish community where he grew up. He described the…
Securing Jewish institutions has rarely been this complicated: There’s the question of reopening, a spike in anti-Semitic activity online — which security experts worry could translate to physical attacks — and the pressing national conversation about racism in policing, and the Jewish community’s relationship to police. The Secure Community Network is the Jewish organization at…
Juneteenth celebrates one of the most important events in American history: the end of slavery. June 19, 1865, was Galveston, Texas, finally freed its enslaved people — the last place in the United States to do so. Now, 155 years later, the country is convulsed by a critical conversation about the systemic racism that is…
More than 1,500 people have signed an open letter published Friday that uses the religious language of “obligation” to demand that Jewish groups reserve 20% of board seats for Jews of color and take other steps to increase their representation at a time of national soul-searching about systemic racism. “Judaism is predicated on a covenant…
Texas is a famously conservative state, and not known for responding quickly to progressive political movements. Yet the Texas State Police has responded to the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the country with a commitment to provide every one of their 80,000 officers with “implicit bias training” that helps them identify their own unconscious biases…
אַבֿרהם שטערן, אַ פֿרומער ייִד, האָט פֿאַרטראַכט חשבון־מכשירים וואָס האָבן דערפֿירט צום מאָדערנעם קאָמפּיוטערײַ.
