On the February night that President Trump unveiled his travel ban on immigrants from Muslim countries, Samir Malik, a 31-year-old tech developer whose parents are from Pakistan, was on his way to dinner in Brooklyn. Text messages buzzed on his phone. Activist friends of his were on the way to JFK airport to protest. He…
“Congressman Zeldin, how could you do this to us?” This question was posed in a 30-second video ad aired shortly after the May 4 House vote adopting the American Health Care Act, also known as “Trumpcare.” The ad was aimed at the Republican congressman representing New York’s 1st Congressional District, one of two dozen House…
It’s springtime in other parts of the world, but Chicago is still dark and grim. This is a good week for going to a museum and getting all existential and gloomy. As it happens, there’s a unique chronicler of the Holocaust coming to town who fits the bill. On Tuesday, May 16, Father Patrick Desbois,…
(JTA) — Only one religious group in the U.S. has a federally proclaimed month celebrating their history: the Jews. In 2006, President George W. Bush officially declared May as Jewish American Heritage Month. Yet Jewish American Heritage Month, or JAHM, hardly seems a priority — not in the government, not in the media, not even within the…
(JTA) — Once it was the job of the shtadlan — a literal translation from Hebrew is “intercessor” — to make the case for the Jews to the czar, the sultan, the king. Now a couple of the president’s men are seeking shtadlans to make their case to the Jews. Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s…
When he accepted the role of deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein had no way of knowing he would end up right smack in the middle of the biggest crisis to rock Donald Trump’s presidency so far. The Jewish lawyer from Maryland rode a low-key reputation as a fair-minded federal prosecutor to overwhelming congressional confirmation —…
Religious leaders, family members and politicians gathered in the Boston suburb of Sharon on Sunday to mark the groundbreaking of construction on a new mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) in honor of local terror victim Ezra Schwartz. Named Mikvah Mei Ezra (Mikvah Helping Waters), the new bath is part of a renovation project at the Mikvah…
Carl Bernstein knows a corrupt president when he sees one – after all, this is the man who helped bring down President Richard Nixon in 1974. “Donald Trump suffers from ethical blindness regarding conflicts of interests of a kind we have never seen in a presidency in the United States in the current era,” the…
JERUSALEM (JTA) – David Rubinger’s iconic photograph of three paratroopers at the Western Wall is the defining image of the 1967 Six-Day War. The men in the photo — Dr. Yitzhak Yifat, Tzion Karasenti and Chaim Oshri — have proudly served as symbols of the historic Israeli victory for the past five decades. But in an…
Workers at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance say they were driven to form a union after Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center’s founder and dean, gave the benediction at Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony in January. Many tour guides and front-line staffers at the Los Angeles museum are paid minimum wage, receive no health insurance,…
(JTA) — These days there are smartphone applications for pretty much anything, from ordering food to finding a date to reporting anti-Semitic incidents. But what about tools for living a religious Jewish life? Well, there are apps for that, too. Whereas in the time before smartphones, observant Jews may have had to ask their rabbis certain…
