Until now, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner were the main targets of ire for the overwhelmingly liberal American-Jewish community, horrified that members of its own tribe could have contributed to the policies and tone of the Trump White House. But this past week marked a turning point: Jewish fury is now aimed squarely…
“This Siddur seeks to reflect a sensitivity to women’s prayer experiences.” That understated line is nestled in the editor’s introduction to a Modern Orthodox group’s new siddur, or prayer book. It’s part of a short, scholarly bullet point outlining how the siddur accommodates women through its textual and grammatical updates. Many of those updates, however,…
Hundreds of people holding purple placards with messages including “This is what ‘Never Again’ looks like,” gathered outside the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in lower Manhattan Thursday evening to protest President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy. The protest — organized by T’ruah and co-sponsored by groups including J Street NYC and Bend the…
When Sala Kirschner, formerly Sala Garncarz, was separated from her family in the midst of the Holocaust, she did not know when she would see them again. Kirschner and her family were stuck in a Jewish ghetto in occupied southwestern Poland’s Sosnowiec when Kirschner’s older sister, Raizel, was conscripted to work by the Germans. Kirschner…
Ivanka Trump finally broke her silence on President Trump’s unpopular policy of separating immigrant children from parents when she thanked him for signing a controversial executive order allowing immigrant families to be imprisoned together. Thank you @POTUS for taking critical action ending family separation at our border. Congress must now act + find a lasting…
The history of gentrification and white flight in Crown Heights has a surprising figure at its center: the Chabad-Lubavitch rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. As the leader of one of the most influential Jewish groups in New York, Schneerson had an outsized influence on the politics and population of Crown Heights, which contains the headquarters of…
The intensity of the unrest that rocked Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood in 1991 is often surprising to those who learn about it. With streets dotted with small businesses and stately architecture, Crown Heights does not look like the site of one of New York’s most significant race riots. However, the legacy of the three-day riot…
Crown Heights was predominantly Jewish from the 1920s through the 1960s, but the neighborhood was more secular than we know it to be today. In 1959, in a humorous column for the Forverts, Joseph Simon Goldstein noted the dramatic shift in observance as the Lubavitch movement began to take more prominence. In his piece, he…
A developer’s plan to erect two luxury buildings in a low-slung residential part of Brooklyn with large Hasidic and black communities sparked the latest wave of concern over skyrocketing rents in the neighborhood, which threatens the two groups who had a history of tension, culminating in the Crown Heights riots of the earl ’90s. Cornell…
New development projects in New York City, like the proposed 16-story residential buildings in a Crown Heights area zoned for smaller buildings, have to provide certain percentages of below-market units due to the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy. Mayor Bill de Blasio pushed through the new MIH guidelines in 2016, making it compulsory for developers…
American Jewish leaders and community members are traveling to immigration detention sites around the country to protest the separation of immigrant children from their parents, which one rabbi called a “moral state of emergency.” Rabbi Elliott Tepperman of Bnai Keshet in Montclair, New Jersey traveled on Father’s Day along with other faith leaders and several…
