As Jewish groups push Congress to increase sanctions on Iran — and President Obama pushes back hard in the opposite direction — one lawmaker standing at the crossroads of this clash exemplifies the challenge the Jewish groups face. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida is a member of the House of Representatives; not the Senate, where…
SAR High School, a Modern Orthodox institution in Riverdale, New York, is now allowing girls to wear tefillin. Rabbi Tully Harcsztark, head of the school, sent out an email explaining that two girls were granted permission to wrap tefillin at the school’s daily all-girls meeting, reports the Boiling Pot, the online student newspaper of Shalhevet…
Hungarian Jewish leaders demanded the resignation of a key government appointee and threatened to boycott government-sponsored events marking the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. In an unusually strong statement posted Sunday on its website, the leadership of Mazsihisz, the official Hungarian Jewish umbrella organization, said they were “aghast and find incomprehensible” the “relativization…
In the year since 20 school children and six adults were murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., the organized Jewish community has been frustrated by the inability of a paralyzed Congress to agree on new gun control regulation. Two rabbis, however, not willing to take no for an answer, have…
(Haaretz) — What has made some people nervous about Angela Buchdahl becoming the senior rabbi at Central Synagogue – one of the two largest Reform synagogues in New York and one of the biggest in the United States – is not that she’s the first Asian-American rabbi. It’s not that she’s a woman or, at…
In the aftermath of the attempted coup that rocked Turkey over the weekend, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has pointed a finger of blame at Fethullah Gulen, a onetime ally based in the U.S. Here’s how the Forward profiled the controversial cleric — and explained how his less-confrontational stance toward Israel fed his villification by Turkey’s…
A majority of respondents in a recent Polish national survey believe that there’s a Jewish conspiracy to control international banking and the media. And 90% of these Poles say they’ve never met a Jew. The national study, conducted by the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University, found that in Poland, the belief in…
An old apartment building in Burlington, Vt. seems like an odd place to find a rare survivor of Lithuanian synagogue art and a relic of American immigrant Yiddishkeit. But the nature of treasures is that they turn up in unexpected places, and Burlington is home to a century-old synagogue mural that is an extraordinary artistic…
I had a great idea: Take the whole family to Paris for our 50th anniversary. Even better: Make it a Jewish experience, as well. It is always a bit tricky planning grand events for a family when there are youngsters involved. In this case, a pair of teenagers — 17-year-old Corey and 13-year-old Jane, two…
“We welcome every student. We love them. We embrace them.” So said Eric Fingerhut, who just four months into his job as president and CEO of Hillel International is embroiled in a debate about how far Jewish students can push the limits of Israel discussion from within the Hillel tent. “Any student that doesn’t feel…
When West Bromwich Albion striker Nicolas Anelka exposed British soccer fans to the quasi-Nazi salute now sweeping his native France, Jewish groups were confident a strong response was coming. After all, Britain is considered a leader in the fight against xenophobia in sports thanks to its successful education programs and the tough stance of its…
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