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Two Old Jews Argue Over Whose Arteries Are Worse
The campaigns of Sen. Bernie Sanders and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg traded jabs Wednesday over each other’s health history. After his heart attack in October, Sanders, 78, promised “full disclosure” about his medical status. But while the campaign has released letters from doctors assessing that he was fit to campaign again, he…
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East Ramapo is racially segregated. Its school board campaigns are, too.
Soon after Jean Fields moved to Spring Valley, in Rockland County, N.Y., in the early 1990s, she drove around to get the lay of the land. One memorable moment was when Fields and her husband, both of whom are black, unwittingly drove into New Square, the Hasidic village run by followers of the Skverer rabbinic…
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East Ramapo trial offers fraught question: Should Hasidic Jews be considered ‘white’?
Are Jews white? And if a white majority is overwhelmingly made up of Orthodox Jews, does it make any legal difference? These are among the fraught questions at the center of a trial unfolding in U.S. District Court regarding the East Ramapo School District, which serves a spread of suburbs about an hour’s drive north…
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In East Ramapo trial, trying to untangle race and policy in school board elections
Testimony from two witnesses Thursday at the trial over the East Ramapo Central School District spoke to a key question at the center of the case: Are elections won and lost over questions of race, or of policy? Outside of a courtroom, it is often hard to separate the two things. For example, consider the…
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If an algorithm thinks Hasidic Jews are black, is it wrong? Day 3 of East Ramapo trial
It’s a courtroom trial, but it felt like a math class. Wednesday saw expert testimony on racially segregated voting in the East Ramapo Central School District, a majority Orthodox suburban district that has been plagued by a battle over funding to the district’s public schools. The case concerns East Ramapo’s at-large voting system, which a…
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White supremacists are putting out more propaganda than ever, but meeting less
The Anti-Defamation League released a report Wednesday on the increase in white supremacist propaganda in the United States during 2019. Here’s what you should know: 2019 saw a doubling in propaganda activity since 2018. The ADL said last year’s 2,713 reported cases made up the highest number of incidents they’ve ever recorded. There were 630…
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Canadians, like New Yorkers, sue their government to force change in yeshivas
Read in Yiddish. For the first time, the Canadian government is getting a taste of what New York City and state have been dealing with for years — a trial over a lawsuit accusing it of failing to provide adequate secular education to Hasidic children. Yohanan Lowen, and his wife Shifra, claim in the lawsuit…
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East Ramapo trial begins: ‘The white community will always win’ vs. ‘literally whitewashing’ Hasidic Jews
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — Lawyers on Monday presented starkly different perspectives on identity politics in a suburban New York school district, as a federal trial opened in a voting-rights case that caps more than a dozen years of battle over funding between Orthodox Jews and their mostly black and Latino neighbors. The case concerns the…
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In this diverse, changing suburb, liberal Jews are struggling to understand their Hasidic neighbors
Sometimes, when Katrina Hertzberg sees a visibly Jewish person in her neighborhood in Nyack, N.Y. — a woman wearing a wig, say, or a man in a black suit and hat — she thinks to herself, “Oh my God, are we next?” She wonders whether her area of Rockland County, N.Y., is next to receive…
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I got to ask Sanders about being Jewish on CNN, but that won’t decide my vote.
What does it mean to be Jewish? For me, it is the lens through which I view the world. My responsibility is to tikkun olam (repairing the world) whether by feeding the hungry or welcoming immigrants or fighting for justice. Senator Bernie Sanders has spoken of his Jewish heritage while acknowledging he does not actively…
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Here’s how Hillel’s new CEO says they’re fighting anti-Semitism on campus
Jewish parents have long expressed concerns over anti-Semitism on college campuses – concerns that have recently intensified in tandem with the rise in violent anti-Semitic incidents nationwide. That’s why the Forward asked Adam Lehman, the new CEO of the Jewish campus organization Hillel International, for an interview centered around anti-Semitism. The Forward questioned Lehman about…
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