Are You a Kohen? You Could be a Mormon Bishop. If your last name is Kohn, Coen, Kahn, Kahan, Cohen, etc., you may have priestly, patrilineal descent from Aaron, the brother of Moses. While the temple still stood, your ancestors performed the daily and holiday duties associated with sacrificial offerings. Now, no longer attending to…
We were living in Dublin when the first emergency phone call came in. My father, then 80, was heading into surgery in Baltimore. They ended up removing a lung and reaming out important arteries full of cancer. In my mind’s eye I saw the rogue cells that would then pump through his body and lodge…
When I became a Mormon at age 16 in Los Angeles, I didn’t convert from Judaism. It was when I finally made a trip “back east” at age 21 and met my relatives that I fully realized I was Jewish. Although I had spent day and night glued to the radio during the Six Day…
It began with a phone call on a cold winter day in January 1998. The purpose of the call, from a neighboring Mormon bishop I’d never spoken with before, was unusual: He was requesting a minyan. As president of a small lay-led congregation in Idaho Falls, Idaho — one of the only two Jewish congregations…
After the head of the government’s ethics office, Walter M. Shaub Jr., expressed doubts about President-elect Donald Trump’s commitment to avoiding conflicts of interest, Trump received an assist from Rep. Jason Chaffetz, head of the House’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Chaffetz is threatening to investigate Shaub’s agency, the Government Ethics Monitor. Here are a…
The city of Bath, England is a quiet and small one. In fact, I’m not entirely sure how it constitutes a city; with a population of barely 100,000 and no buildings exceeding ten stories in height, it’s hardly the teeming metropolis of Manhattan that I grew up in. Nevertheless, it is a city that I…
In Utah, the presidential ticket of Evan McMullin (a Mormon) and Mindy Finn (a Jew) has a real shot at winning the state. During our reporting on this, we found that there are a lot of Mormons who really like Jews. So why do have Mormons a soft spot for Jews? “Mormons feel a great…
A Mormon and a Jew walk into a bar. What sounds like the beginning of a joke is an important political reality in 2016 — at least in Utah. Last month, independent candidate Evan McMullin chose Mindy Finn as his running mate. Finn is a veteran GOP strategist who runs a feminist non-profit. The Texan…
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