Rabbi Rachel Cowan, the mother of the “Jewish healing” movement, was hailed throughout the Jewish world for giving new life to the ancient practice of visiting a sickly person to pray over them. And in the moment she needed such prayer most desperately, it came in force — via the internet. Last year, Cowan’s friends…
The first sign of trouble might have been in May, when a poll showed him doing far worse among his fellow Jews than with Democratic voters in general. Or it could have been in July, when the Forward found that Jews formed a smaller part of his major donor base than nearly every other candidate….
Updated 9:40 a.m. When a Jew dies, it swiftly sets in motion a succession of ancient customs, often carried out by the local community. The body is guarded until burial. A special group — called a “holy society” in Hebrew — prepares the body for burial in a custom called the tahara, the purification. Prayers…
George Selim knows more about fighting domestic terrorism than almost anyone – and four days after a white nationalist gunman killed 22 people in an El Paso Walmart, he said the United States is doing it wrong. These days, Selim is a senior vice president at the Anti-Defamation League in charge of their education and…
For Jews, the saddest day of the year is almost here. It’s a holiday called Tisha B’Av; it happens this weekend, and it compresses every Jewish tragedy into one searing day of fasting and mourning. The First and Second Temples were both destroyed on “Tisha,” or the ninth, of the Hebrew month of Av, according…
In 2008, Jeffrey Epstein, a financier and philanthropist, pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor and registered as a sex offender. In 2017, one of the biggest Jewish charities in America accepted a $50,000 donation from him. In 2019, Epstein was accused of new sex trafficking charges. Now what? That charity, UJA-Federation of New…
(JTA) — Despite the president calling her an anti-Israel Jew-hater, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t actually said a ton about Israel and the Jews. Until now, that is. In a lengthy radio interview Tuesday, AOC expounded on a huge range of Jewish topics — from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to anti-Semitism to Jewish social justice activism to…
A fraught email exchange posted to Facebook has highlighted one New York yeshiva’s initial attempts to discuss a difficult question: What do Jewish organizations do about the Wexner Foundation? The Wexner Foundation was created by Les Wexner, the real estate mogul who funneled $200 million to the sex trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein. It has been…
Senator Bernie Sanders holds the record for the most successful Jewish presidential campaign in American history. He has relatives who died in the Holocaust. He’s speaking more about his Jewish identity. He once played a rabbi in a movie, and he barely even had to act. He is not, however, the presidential candidate who is…
For the past few months, the Forward has been working on a project to quantitatively analyze Jewish political activity in the Democratic presidential primary. Our first article in this series, examining Jewish donations to Democratic presidential candidates, can be read here. Which donors did we track? Every three months, candidates for president and Congress have…
The elite Jewish school that received a $500,000 donation from Jeffrey Epstein had a unique connection to the mysterious financier charged for sex trafficking of minor girls. The lawyer responsible for getting Epstein his “deal of a lifetime” sent his children to that very school, and was a leader in that community. In October 2007,…
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