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Breaking News New York Rabbis Arrested at Eric Garner Police Brutality Protest
Several prominent rabbis and the president of a national teachers union were arrested Thursday night while protesting police brutality. Rabbis Sharon Kleinbaum, Jill Jacobs, and Shai Held, along with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, were taken into custody for blocking traffic to protest a grand jury’s decision not to indict…
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Breaking News New York Rabbis Join Protest of Eric Garner Decision
Several high-profile New York rabbis are scheduled to join a Manhattan protest of a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man. The march set for Thursday night on the heavily Jewish Upper West Side neighborhood is being coordinated by the Jews for Racial & Economic…
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Opinion I Don’t Want To Feel ‘Safe’ at Eric Garner’s Expense
A demonstrator cries while protesting the Eric Garner grand jury decision / Getty Images (JTA) — The words of Leviticus (19:6) admonish us not to “stand idly by while the blood of your neighbor is shed.” These words should sting our ears and shock our conscience in the wake of a Staten Island grand jury’s decision…
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News Hasidic Enclave Keeps Its Secrets Amid Elusive Rebbe’s Tight Control
To his hasidim, Rabbi David Twersky is nearly akin to God. But that does not mean he exempts himself from the obligations God imposes on all Jews, at least as traditionalists understand them. Like his followers, Twersky prays to God three times a day. But unlike other Hasidic grand rabbis, Twersky does not pray in…
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Culture How ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Shattered My Dreams
When “Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway in the fall of 1964, I was singing in the chorus in “Ben Franklin In Paris,” another Broadway show, which starred Robert Preston. I also performed in the ballroom scene whenever one of the dancers wasn’t feeling well, because I was the only singer who could also…
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Culture Searching for Amenia, New York’s Lost Jewish Vacationland
One spring day in 1927, two New York City real estate speculators drove upstate to Dutchess County with a couple of girls and had a bit to drink. Before they got home again, they had bought half of Amenia, an old upstate mining hamlet ringed with dairy farms. By summer, they were selling bungalows on…
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Opinion Abraham Goes ‘On Trial’ for Attempted Murder
The Binding of Isaac It’s a question that has puzzled believers, scholars and philosophers for millennia: Did Abraham really intend to kill his son Isaac? On November 16, Jewish New Yorkers had a chance to decide the question once and for all, when Abraham was put on trial for child endangerment and attempted second-degree murder….
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Culture Of Egg Creams, Ed Koch and 49 Other Facts You Didn’t Know About Jewish New York
1. The first Jews to set foot in North America arrived in New York as a group of 23 in 1654. 2. Congregation Shearith Israel, founded in New York in 1654, was the first synagogue in the colonies. It was the sole purveyor of kosher meat until 1813. 3. By the late 19th century, there…
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Film & TV Bonhoeffer biopic tells of a pastor turned would-be Hitler assassin — but is the story true?
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Culture At 95, Shaindel Schreiber is still dispensing babka and advice on the Lower East Side
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Opinion As a Jewish biblical scholar in Houston, I’m enraged that Texas is adopting this biblically illiterate new curriculum
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Fast Forward Trump has vilified George Soros. He just picked the Jewish billionaire’s protege for Treasury Secretary.
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News With a roster of promising athletes, Vienna’s 115-year-old Hakoah Sports Club has found new life
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News Israel reached a ceasefire in Lebanon. Why does Gaza seem so hard?
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Culture Barbra Streisand recorded here — and so did Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, John Lennon and, uh, The Village People
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Fast Forward Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to helm EPA, says he received bomb threat with ‘pro-Palestinian themed message’
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