Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of climate change and its impact on the Jewish community.
Climate Change
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Culture Why Glaciers Are the Most Jewish Geological Formation — and Other Lessons From Alaska
The glaciers in Alaska are a natural wonder to behold. I ‘ve been spending some days around them (via boats) and over them (via float planes). They remind me, funnily enough, of the Bible and its story of what the world looked like before God populated the earth with some Jews, some anti-Semites and everyone…
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Breaking News Reconstructionists Set Yom Kippur Climate Change Service for Pope’s Visit
The Reconstructionist movement is organizing a Yom Kippur service at the Lincoln Memorial timed for Pope Francis’ visit to Washington and tailored to his climate change message. The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and Jewish Reconstructionist communities are cosponsoring the event on the National Mall. Philadelphia’s Shalom Center is organizing the event. The services Tuesday night and…
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Opinion Why Climate Change Is a Jewish Issue — and the Pope Is Right
It’s been strangely reassuring to watch Republican presidential candidates jump all over Pope Francis for his new encyclical letter on the environment. I’m comforted by the fact that he’s getting hit with pretty much the same criticisms I get when I write about climate in the Forward: What does this have to do with your…
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Opinion What the Pope’s Climate Change Edict Means For Jews
Today Pope Francis made history. He just published a much anticipated encyclical on the environment, called Laudato Si’ (Praised Be). This is the first time that someone who may well be the moral and spiritual leader of the world has made preservation of the environment part of official Catholic moral teaching. Right off the bat…
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Opinion The 95% Doctrine of Climate Change
In November 2001, faced with unconfirmed reports that Pakistani scientists might be helping Al Qaeda get a nuclear weapon, Vice President Dick Cheney articulated what became known as the Cheney Doctrine: If there’s even a 1% chance that the unimaginable might happen, it must be treated as a certainty and acted on accordingly. “It’s not…
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Opinion Pope Francis Takes On Climate Change — But Who’s Listening?
It’s funny how life keeps handing us surprises. Just now, for example, Pope Francis has launched a global campaign to combat climate change, and it’s meeting fierce resistance from Catholic conservatives. Who saw that coming? I thought I’d heard — from conservatives, if memory serves — that it’s liberals who habitually sin by substituting their…
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Opinion The Just Way To Share Water
With Earth Day on April 22 and the unprecedented drought in California affecting the nation’s most populous state, there’s a Hasidic story about a frog that you should hear. The legendary founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, or Besht, was wandering a vast desert when he met a frog so large, he couldn’t tell…
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Opinion With Friends Like These (on Iran), Who Needs Enemies?
On March 3, addressing a joint meeting of Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the emerging nuclear agreement with Iran to be scrapped and replaced with “a much better deal.” Many things have been said for and against the prime minister’s plea, some convincing, some less so. But the most decisive reply came…
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News Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
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Fast Forward Their Pacific Palisades synagogue is standing, but all three rabbis lost their homes
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News ‘Do you have the Torahs?’ Synagogue races LA wildfire to rescue its past and future
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Music For Bob Dylan’s biographer, ‘A Complete Unknown’ is a dream come true — even if it’s mostly fiction
In Case You Missed It
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Opinion Celebrating Shabbat in Los Angeles: Amid the fires, a still, small voice
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Opinion ‘Home is memory’: How Jews make sense of what they’ve lost in the LA fires and what remains
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News LA fires won’t stop bar mitzvahs this Shabbat, as joy and pain meet
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News HIAS cuts 22 staff even as it braces for Trump immigration crackdown
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