Armed with a presidential tweet, a bill moving forward in Congress and a pending lawsuit, Jewish and Christian advocates believe they are on the verge of overturning a long-standing policy that has prohibited federal emergency funds from reaching houses of worship hit by natural disasters. The public face of this campaign is Christian. A short…
Donald Trump enjoyed majority support from Orthodox Jews during the election. But a growing number of observant Jews are stepping forward to decry the president — and they are going public with their opposition at this weekend’s nationwide protests against racism. A Facebook group called Torah Trumps Hate, formed days after the election, has mushroomed to…
President Trump may still be wondering how he backed the wrong horse in the Alabama GOP senate primary. But Breitbart News and Steve Bannon already knows who to blame. It’s all Jared Kushner’s fault. According to the right-wing platform, ran by ex-White House political supremo Bannon, Kushner misled the president and pushed him to actively…
Seven months after one of Orthodox Judaism’s oldest and biggest institutions barred women clergy from its synagogues, the decision is threatening to create yet another split in a community already riven by the issue of female rabbis. Founded more than 100 years ago, the Orthodox Union is a coalition of synagogues and other organizations, most…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Ben Cardin, one of a handful of Senate Democrats who opposed the Iran nuclear deal, urged the Trump administration not to pull out of it — the latest indication of congressional resistance to killing the agreement. “If we violate a U.N. resolution, in the eyes of the international community, do we have…
Paula White, the charismatic megachurch leader and spiritual adviser to Donald Trump, fasts on Yom Kippur and urges her millions of followers to do the same. They’re also supposed to reflect on “the atoning blood of Jesus.” “The Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, is God’s biblical holy day that He established on Israel’s calendar…
23andMe isn’t the only company that conducts mail-order DNA tests that reveal consumers’ ancestry. There’s also MyHeritage, Living DNA and GPS Origins, to name a few. But it’s 23andMe, founded in 2006, whose name is becoming a synonym for spitting in a vial and finding out what percentage of you comes from where. Now the…
Earlier this month, a woman who had broken with ultra-Orthodox Judaism welcomed another ex-Orthodox man into her home in New Jersey. The man had promised to advise her on managing divorce proceedings with young children. He claimed to have been through a similar ordeal, she said. Instead of asking her about her upcoming trial, the…
A few weeks ago, Holly Davies was getting ready to homeschool her kids and preparing the family for the High Holidays. When Hurricane Harvey hit, she helped evacuate 150 people from her neighborhood by airboat and shelter nearly 100 people in a local church. Then came the hard part. For the past three weeks, Davies…
Each year of Barack Obama’s presidency, hundreds of rabbis from all denominations had an annual heart-to-heart with him during a High Holidays conference call. Why is this year different? A coalition representing thousands of rabbis from the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements opted out. They said they couldn’t countenance such a connection with Trump after…
The two-state solution, once a cornerstone of American and Israeli policy and official communications, is now so explosive that it cannot be uttered even when the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel meet to discuss the future of the Middle East. “I really believe peace between the Palestinians and Israel…
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