“I experience racism in the Jewish community on a regular basis,” said Rabbi Sandra Lawson, one of four North Carolina rabbis behind an urgent call for American Jews to take action against police violence. “As a black queer woman, I don’t see a lot of people who look like me.” Long before Lawson was ordained,…
Editor’s Note: Click here for an article about the author’s experience sharing Hebrew prayers with members of the National Guard. On Wednesday, June 3rd, I went to protest in Washington DC. I went because I believe it was demanded of me as a Jew and an American. First I want to speak to the question…
Adam Rapoport, the longtime editor in chief of food magazine Bon Appétit, resigned after a photo showing him wearing a racist costume surfaced on Twitter and several staffers publicly called out racist practices within the magazine. In a statement on Instagram, Rapoport, who led the magazine since 2010, wrote, “I am stepping down as editor-in-chief…
A city council member’s chief of staff recalled a walk home from school that became an involuntary trip to the police station, on suspicion of truancy. A congressman described working with the Congressional Black Congress on budget proposals — only for white colleagues to reject them every year. New York’s attorney general comforted her teenage…
As a rabbi watching President Trump standing, Bible in hand, in front of Washington DC’s St. John’s Episcopal Church, I wondered what scriptural verse the President could draw on for inspiration. We were, as we remain, in the midst of a national crisis. A double pandemic, Covid-19 and the virus of systemic racism. The moment…
The experience of watching, on video, George Floyd desperately plead for his life — and yet still suffer the cruelest of deaths in the middle of the street in the middle of the day in the middle of America — has collectively galvanized millions of us. We’ve realized that we are obligated to struggle against…
Welcome to the first of what we hope will be a recurring feature in which we explore a passage from the Talmud that resonates with current events. The goal is not to determine “the Jewish view” but to prompt thought and discussion. You can find more about this passage — Sanhedrin 74a-b — at the…
In his 1936 essay “The Storyteller,” the renowned critical theorist Walter Benjamin contrasts the “story” with the morning news, the primary mode in which information was disseminated in his era. Benjamin was not interested in the idea of a story: what makes something a story, how stories work. He was instead interested in the tradition…
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