Rabbi Avram Mlotek was washing dishes and listening to the radio when he heard that seven immigrant detainees had started a hunger strike at Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, New Jersey. “I’m from Bergen County, so that set off my antenna,” said Mlotek, who lives in Manhattan and leads BASE Hillel, a community outreach organization…
With just days left before the presidential election, Rabbi Ben Zeidman’s inbox has been filling with emails from congregants offering conflicting answers to the same set of questions. “Who’s better for Israel? Who likes or hates the Jews? Who’s courting antisemitic leaders?” Zeidman said. “You replace one political party leader with another — one presidential…
Dawn Wooten, a nurse who rocketed into national attention after filing a whistleblower report alleging that immigrant women detained by ICE at a private facility were being subjected to forced hysterectomies, looked straight at the camera. “I had several detained women on numerous occasions that would come to me and say, ‘Ms. Wooten, I had…
When we traveled with congregants to the U.S/Mexico Border over a year ago to bear witness to the brutality being perpetrated, we didn’t imagine we’d confront a strikingly modern version of our own ancient story — our religious narrative — of trying to escape degradation for a chance at dignity. But that’s precisely what we…
A new book claims that Katie Miller, Mike Pence’s press secretary and the wife of Stephen Miller, felt no compassion for the migrant families separated at the border. “My family and colleagues told me that when I have kids I’ll think about family separation differently,” Miller (then going by her maiden name, Waldman) is quoted…
Every pandemic begins with a terrifying moment in which it seems impossible to explain what is happening. Often, whoever is considered the “other” in society is blamed, a scapegoating we see happening here and now. President Trump’s administration has drawn criticism for periodically insisting on calling the coronavirus “the Chinese virus,” a move many see…
(JTA) — A grand jury declined to indict a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who drove his truck into a row of Jewish protesters at an ICE detention center. Capt. Thomas Woodworth resigned his position days after the August incident at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, where protesters were…
Seventeen years old, with flat-ironed hair and carefully distressed jeans, Bar seems like she’d be perfectly at home at any American high school. She likes celebrating Shabbat with her parents and younger siblings, but she’s also impatient to become an “independent person.” But this seemingly ordinary case of adolescent angst is complicated by her family’s…
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