JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Updated April 28 When the coronavirus starts to recede, Jewish life across the United States will look a lot like it already does in Fargo. Only 150 Jews live in the biggest city in North Dakota, but it’s one of the few places in the country where the governor hasn’t ordered people to stay home,…
This story began in 1858 with the birth of my great-grandfather in a Russian shtetl. But the most recent chapter began six years ago at the Ashley Jewish Homesteaders Cemetery in Ashley, North Dakota. My great-grandfather, a Russian-Jewish immigrant turned first-time farmer on the Dakota plains, is buried there, along with other members of the…
The father of one of the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville, Va. last week has written a letter to his hometown newspaper denouncing his son and saying he was no longer welcome home until he renounced his bigotry. Pearce Tefft of Fargo, N.D. wrote to the local newspaper The Forum after his son, Peter,…
Mark Zuckerberg toured a North Dakota drilling rig on Tuesday. The Facebook boss peppered industry workers in the No. 2 U.S. oil-producing state with questions about automation, safety and fracking — but forgot to wear his goggles. The visit to North Dakota, which pumps about 1.1 million barrels of oil per day – more than…
(JTA) — North Dakota’s oldest Jewish pioneer cemetery has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. Sons of Jacob cemetery in Garske, in the state’s northeast, served a community of about 100 Jewish homesteaders from Eastern Europe. A group of descendants and locals applied to the state historical society for the national register; their application was approved by…
Amid the rolling prairie, under the vast Dakota sky, a small fence encloses 20 headstones with surprising Hebrew markings in a field outside the town of Ashley, population 750. Local farmers pass it as they drive for groceries into the town, which has no Jews among its residents. But the graveyard’s most frequent mourners are…
The Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit of anti-Semitic incidents was released on Monday, and came with some saddening statistics. Incidents spiked by one-third in 2016, with more than 1,200 reported acts of vandalism, harassment and assault. Things got even worse this year, with anti-Semitic events spiking 86 percent in 2017’s first quarter. Such hate crimes happened…
One day, Jessye Stein, a computer teacher on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, was trying to persuade a student to return to his Lakota language class when the young man suddenly posed an unexpected question. “He asked me where I come from, where my people come from and what my ancestral language…
