A state law blocking New York City’s effort to charge a nickel apiece for plastic bags at grocery stores is a victory for Brooklyn’s powerful Orthodox community — where large families might mean an outsized burden. The law, signed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Tuesday night, bars the city from enforcing its own law,…
WASHINGTON (JTA) – On June 27, 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1oth Circuit, based in Denver, handed down a decision that would make history a year later when it was upheld by the Supreme Court: Closely held corporations have the same religious freedom rights as individuals. The majority decision in the case…
Abby Stein is almost certainly the only ordained Hasidic rabbi who is also a woman. Stein wasn’t female when ordained, of course. She was a young man, soon to be married to a woman also from the strict Satmar community in which they were both raised. While Stein – then named Yisroel and nicknamed Srully…
NEW YORK (JTA) — Leading up to their wedding in 2012, Julianne and Jason Kanter hadn’t really discussed how they would incorporate their respective religions into their home. Julianne was raised by Catholic and Presbyterian parents, while Jason grew up culturally Jewish. At first, it was simple to mark their different backgrounds. In December, the…
Early last Saturday morning—the Jewish Sabbath—someone smashed the windows of the Chicago Loop Synagogue and drew swastikas on the front of the building. Lee Zoldan, the synagogue’s president, got a phone call with the bad news at 1 a.m. An hour later, she found herself standing with her husband in the middle of Clark Street…
When Betsy DeVos got confirmed as education secretary, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had to find another Trump nomination to attack in his newfound role as leader of his party’s opposition to President Donald Trump. Andy Puzder, the president’s pick for labor secretary, quickly emerged as Schumer’s best option. He proceeded to call on Trump…
In a new report circulating privately in Jewish policy circles this month, two leading pro-Israel groups charge that Jewish communal efforts against the BDS movement have largely failed. The report, issued by the Anti-Defamation League and the Israel-based Reut Institute, claims that Jewish groups’s investments in fighting what they call “the assault on Israel’s legitimacy”…
Valentine’s Day took an ugly turn at the College Republicans’s holiday party at Central Michigan University, when a card featuring Adolf Hitler and bearing the words “my love 4 u burns like 6,000 Jews,” mysteriously emerged. Members gave Valentine’s Day bags to each other during the February 8 party, and one bag contained an anti-Semitic…
Holocaust restitution money is supposed to heal wounds. But the Lithuanian government’s payment of $40 million to the country’s small Jewish community has reopened a decades-long dispute between Lithuania’s Jewish leadership and a Chabad rabbi from Boston. Arguments over the money have swelled into a debate about who better represents Lithuanian Jewry — a Hasidic…
It was a mysterious, mislabeled canister that sat for 50 years, undisturbed, in the University of Akron’s archives. But its recent discovery has provided a valuable addition to a precious trove of recordings: the earliest preserved voices of survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, just months after their liberation. The University of Akron’s discovery, announced…
There’s a bombshell deep in this week’s New York Jewish Week story about a conference on sex abuse in the Jewish community: The powerful Orthodox umbrella group Agudath Israel of America is backing off its opposition to extending the statute of limitations for bringing claims against abusers. For nearly a decade, advocates for sex abuse…
100% of profits support our journalism
