Jewish AND Latina? When I was in junior high school in Newton, Massachusetts, a middle class suburb of Boston with a large Jewish population, my friends could not believe that I, a blonde blue-eyed Jewish girl, had a brother named Fernando. “Is he adopted? “ they would ask. This was the 80’s, and Jewish kids…
“I’m a feminist,” Nina Tassler said. “I’m sure you can gather that from our conversation.” She’s right, of course. Figuring that out, in fact, was a no brainer. Our phone conversation, as many do recently, started with politics, and make no mistake about it: she was With Her. “I come from a long line of…
The federal government is charging the Hasidic-owned New York electronics store B&H Photo & Electronics with discriminating against its Hispanic warehouse workers — including separate bathrooms. Hispanic workers at the company’s Brooklyn warehouse are forced to use dirty, often broken restrooms, while white workers have access to “superior” toilets, according to the complaint U.S. Department of…
Benjamin Lerner writes about an interview he came across in the media with Jan Koum, the rags-to-riches Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union who founded WhatsApp and recently sold it to Facebook for a reported $19 billion dollars. Referring to WhatsApp’s emphasis on privacy in its social network, Koum said: “I grew up in…
(JTA) — At the Urban Rustic Cafe in a strip mall in this city located between Miami to the south and the Palm Beach retirement communities to the north, the line for a table stretches out the door and into the parking lot. Inside the kosher establishment, the volume is loud. An elderly Orthodox man…
(JTA) — When Alejandra Schatzky-Cohen and her husband decided to enroll their children in a Reform Jewish day school in North Miami Beach five years ago, they had more on their minds than the average prospective day school parent. The family was living in Caracas at the time and the situation for Jews in Venezuela…
A reader signing herself Goldele asks if I know anything about the origins of the well-known Yiddish proverb “Der mentsh trakht un got lakht,” “A man thinks and God laughs.” The knowledge that the future, whether conceived of as the result of blind fate or of a divine plan, is not under our control is…
As it enters its second century, the organization identified more than any other with fighting anti-Semitism finds levels of anti-Jewish bigotry in America lower than ever. By the admission of the Anti-Defamation League’s own national director, doors once closed to Jews are now almost uniformly open, up to and including the nation’s elite corporate suites,…
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