The secret synagogue of Tajikistan is not hard to find once you know where to look. Like much in Dushanbe, Tajikistan’s small and humdrum capital, the building is on a street whose name no one uses and where few strangers venture. From the outside it could be just another upscale house with a lush courtyard,…
When Courtney Ferriter arrived six years ago in the predominantly Protestant community of Auburn, Alabama, she needed a place where she felt like she belonged. “You feel like you’re a bit of an outsider, so the natural inclination is, you want to go find your people,” Ferriter said. Ferriter, a graduate student at Auburn University,…
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson visited Israel on a tour organized by a for-profit company that has since ceased most of its activity. Ted Cruz took the trip on the dime of a hawkish advocacy group with neoconservative ties. Rand Paul had an anti-gay Christian group pay his way to Jerusalem. And Carly Fiorina, a…
For six months up to April 2015, Tom Frieden, 55, felt the weight of America’s panic. As the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Frieden was the government’s principal contact in stopping the Ebola virus epidemic in America. Starting in 2013, Ebola had ravaged West Africa, killing thousands. Proving difficult to quarantine,…
His grandparents fled a crumbling Ottoman Empire and rising anti-Semitism in Poland to seek refuge in Cuba. His parents left the island’s oppressive communist regime for a better future in the United States. Now, Leon Rodriguez, who grew up in a Cuban-Jewish enclave in Florida, has come full circle: 2015 is his first full year…
The Israeli-American entertainment mogul’s political loyalty was put to a test this year. Haim Saban, a top financial backer and personal friend of Hillary Clinton, and a hawkish supporter of Israel, was faced with a dilemma posed by the proposed Iranian nuclear deal: Clinton was for it; Israel was against it, as was AIPAC, the…
In sermons, Rabbi Capers Funnye quotes from spirituals and the Talmud, from Abraham Joshua Heschel and from black nationalist Marcus Garvey. It’s a preaching style well suited for Funnye’s role as the newly installed chief rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis — the main rabbinical body in the Hebrew Israelite community. And it…
Thirteen-year old Tom Sosnik, one of the youngest people on this year’s Forward 50 list, made headlines in March when a video of him coming out to his class as transgender went viral. Sosnik decided to make his brave speech after reading about Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen who died by suicide in 2014 after…
When Alan Gross was released from a Cuban jail in December 2014, people would have forgiven him if all he wanted was to retire to his Maryland home for a quiet life with his wife, Judy. During his five years in captivity, he lost 100 pounds, considered committing suicide and missed saying goodbye to his…
In the long communal discussion over how to relate to Jews who marry non-Jews, those in the “be welcoming” camp won a major battle this year, thanks in large part to Rabbi Deborah Waxman. Waxman is president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary, which, after more than a year of deliberation, decided in a September faculty…
Chuck Schumer was in a tough spot. The Iran nuclear deal was coming before Congress for approval, and the United States senator from New York had an unenviable decision before him. On the one hand, Schumer was getting an earful from deep-pocketed Jewish donors and activists who opposed the deal. On the other hand, the…
