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News During Ramadan, Jews and Muslims Share Dinner and Friendship — But National Effort Lags Behind
The group that gathered inside a South Brooklyn Jewish community center the evening of Monday, June 20, had trouble staying silent. Young children whimpered impatiently, their eyes on the tables of untouched food, and latecomers whispered excuses as they pushed through the crowded room. Only a man in a light-gray skull cap succeeded in capturing…
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Culture Meet Ahamed Weinberg: The Jewish-Muslim-Catholic Comedian
Growing up, Ahamed Weinberg had a one-of-a-kind answering machine message. It would leave some callers perplexed. “As-salamu alaykum, you’ve reached the Weinbergs!” Weinberg, now 26, is channeling his hybrid identity into comedy. The son of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, both of whom converted to Islam in Philadelphia, he’s spent years explaining his…
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Culture A Concert of Talented Men
Last year Yiddish Soul was the highlight of the Folksbiene’s Kulturfest, a festival that featured hundreds of performances over eight packed days and attracted tens of thousands of attendees. At the time, I wrote in the Yiddish Forward that this high-profile concert of Hasidic and cantorial music, presented as part of SummerStage in Central Park,…
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News 5 Must-Know Facts About New York Police Rabbi Alvin Kass
An unknown assailant attacked Rabbi Alvin Kass, the respected chief chaplain of the New York City Police Department, yesterday while the rabbi was on his morning power walk along Riverside Boulevard. Though the attacker knocked him to the ground, Kass, who is in his eighties, suffered no serious injuries. The Post has reported that Kass…
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Breaking News Jewish Man Charged With Raping Amish Teen ‘Gifted’ to Him by Parents
— A Pennsylvania man identified as Jewish in a federal lawsuit against the Amish church has been charged with the sexual assault of a teen who was “gifted” to him by her parents, who were suing their former church. Police found 12 girls aged 18 years to 6 months in the Lower Southampton home of…
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Opinion What We Orthodox Jews Must Do To Save the Western Wall
On Thursday afternoon, around 500 men and women gathered in the Southern Plaza of the Western Wall — a stone piazza commonly used for swearing in soldiers or taking an iconic tourist selfie near Judaism’s holiest site — to hold a defiant afternoon prayer service in response to what they feel was a terrible display…
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Community Reflections on Jewish Megatrends
It appears to me that Sid Schwarz’s framing of strategies employed by successful Jewish organizations and programs is useful. Given that Beth Am is a synagogue attempting to establish its relevance in the current marketplace of Jewish ideas and with this current generation of American Jews, I believe we employ each of these strategies. Indeed…
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Community Why So-Called Orthodox LGBT ‘Allies’ Are Doing It All Wrong
In the past week, two high profile Orthodox rabbis have come out, in writing, in support of LGBT Orthodox Jews. In Gay and Orthodox: An Oxymoron No More Ysoscher Katz, Chair of Talmud at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, argues that it is not impossible to be both gay and Orthodox, arguing that today it is “no…
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Culture A Jewish snowman movie would have made a lot more sense than Netflix’s ‘Hot Frosty’
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