For as long as Andy Levin can remember, politics was part of his life. He was 4 when his father, Sander Levin, was first elected to Michigan’s State Senate; he spent his pre-teens traipsing around the state through Dad’s two failed gubernatorial bids; and he returned from a college gap year in India to find…
Birmingham, Alabama’s mayor says that protests from the “local Jewish community” led to the cancellation of an award ceremony for a controversial civil rights icon. But questions remain about what role local Jewish leaders played played. In a statement Saturday night, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, a museum focusing on the history of segregation and…
“Everybody’s working for the weekend,” as the song goes. Except rabbis. They work on the weekend. Friday nights are for evening services and hosting guests at home. On Saturdays, the rabbi is at synagogue by 8 or 8:30 a.m. for the main event of his or her week: Shabbat services, with Torah reading. Sunday morning…
When the federal government shut down in late 1995, leaving federal workers without paychecks for nearly a month, Fran Kritz and her family worried that they could lose their home. “We had a new baby and a toddler,” said Kritz, whose husband is a federal employee. “We had no extra money. At that point in…
Members of the Jewish community in Asheville, North Carolina are angry that a local university has invited Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory to be the main speaker for this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. week activities. “I was greatly dismayed that Dr. King’s legacy would be tainted by having Ms. Mallory, who is a friend…
When Ben Novak arrived at Northeastern University in Boston as a first-year student in the fall of 2016, he went looking for a place to pray, and meet other Jews. So naturally, he turned to the local Hillel. But a few months later, the Hillel descended into chaos amid complaints from students that it was…
At B’nai Adath Kol Beth Israel, a Hebrew Israelite congregation in Brooklyn, the rabbis have long doubled as handymen. They’ve fixed plumbing problems and frayed electrical wiring. Thirty years ago, they bought filtration masks and hazmat suits and replaced the asbestos-laden piping in the building. “We made it work,” said Rabbi Baruch Yehudah, the spiritual…
In the final weeks of 2018, New York’s Orthodox Jewish community went into full-blown panic mode. One Orthodox newspaper in Brooklyn, the Flatbush Jewish Journal, ran the screaming front-page headline “ATTACK ON OUR YESHIVAS!” in red, inch-high letters. “The Jewish people will not bow down or surrender to the wicked, not even before the commissioner…
In June of 2015, one of the leading intellectuals of the Jewish establishment stood on stage in front of hundreds of American Jewish leaders and called for the community to picket outside the home of a college junior. It was the keynote speech at the American Jewish Committee’s annual conference in a year when the…
Amos Oz greets me in the lobby of an elegant hotel, looking a little out of place. Like one of the characters in his new book, he is undramatically unkempt: glasses slightly askew; his gray pants and scruffy shoes melding into the background, as if he were a bus driver or a shopkeeper, someone who…
Manny’s, a new business in San Francisco’s Mission District, is part cafe, part bookstore, part political event hall. Owner Manny Yekutiel, a 29-year-old rising star in the world of liberal political organizing, calls it a “civic social gathering space.” It’s hosted incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, activists with Black Lives…
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