JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Supreme Court experts say that Justice Elena Kagan is the vote to watch in an upcoming case over whether a memorial cross on government-owned land violates constitutional guidelines on the separation between church and state. Kagan, who is Jewish, has written forcefully in favor of church-state separation. But on the issue of religious memorials on…
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has long been famous for her hip alter ego, “The Notorious RBG,” but now it appears that another justice on the bench also has an avatar on the scene. Court observers have noted that amid the flood of crowd-sourced Ginsburg fan swag, items featuring “Special K,” a street-styled character…
— The Supreme Court’s three Jewish justices missed the start of the new term due to Rosh Hashanah. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan were not present on the opening day on Monday. Federal law requires the court to open on the first Monday in October. The session lasted only about five minutes…
Sometime after I became editorial page editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1994, I was invited to have breakfast with Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, the archbishop of Philadelphia. Even though my devout Catholic secretary coached me on how to address him and what I might expect, I was apprehensive – afraid that I would feel uncomfortable…
When the U.S. Supreme Court talks about religion, all hell breaks loose. A dispute over an upstate New York town’s prayer before council meetings produced an unusually testy oral-argument session on Wednesday that recalled the decades of difficulty Supreme Court justices have had drawing the line between church and state. Court decisions involving freedom of…
The Supreme Court’s June 25 decision striking down key elements of a longstanding law protecting minority voting rights touched a chord with the Jewish community which has strongly supported the law although its direct impact on Jewish voters has been marginal. Jewish organizations decried the court’s 5-to-4 ruling, which deemed part of the 1965 Voting…
