I recently received an invitation from the Consulate General of Israel in Chicago to visit Israel. I should have felt proud. I should have felt honored. I should have felt something. But I didn’t. Imagine, a trip to the Holy Land, the land promised by God to Abraham: I’d wanted to go for so long,…
In 1939, my grandmother left Vienna with her sister, parents and the few belongings they could carry and headed by ship, east to Shanghai. They were among tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the violence of Naziism who would make the city their home for the next several years. They lived in a single…
President Trump, you may have heard, is soon embarking on the first international trip of his presidency – to Saudi Arabia, Israel, The Vatican, Italy and Brussels. What you may not have heard is that while in Saudi Arabia, there is a possibility that Trump will not only meet with King Salman, who is currently allegedly…
Mutasim Ali, one of the only Africa asylum seekers granted refugee status by Israel, is taking his story of resilience on the road with an upcoming U.S. tour sponsored in part by the New Israel Fund. But there’s just one problem: Ali is from Sudan, one of the six countries on President Trump’s revised travel…
(JTA) — David Steiner, a documentary filmmaker from Chicago who was studying to be a rabbi, was killed in a bus crash in rural Uganda. Steiner, 51, the creator of the award-winning documentary “Saving Barbara Sizemore,” about efforts to save a charter school in Chicago, was the only fatality in Monday’s crash. His son, Itamar, and…
Ten years ago I received a phone call that changed my life. Gerri Trooskin, the director of our city-wide book club, One Book, One Philadelphia, called me with an unusual request. She asked me to choose ten of my Drexel University undergraduate creative writing students to interview ten Sudanese refugees. These interviews would be serialized…
Mutasim Ali always believed that he would succeed in his fight to secure refugee status for the thousands of asylum seekers in Israel. He just never thought that he would attain the status himself. As a leader in the movement for refugee rights, Ali, 29, assumed that his activism — which included organizing large-scale protests…
The South Sudanese army is using Israeli weapons to fight its civil war, according to a United Nations report. A U.N. Security Council report about the conflict said that photographs showed South Sudanese officers and soldiers using the Ace, an advanced version of the Galil assault rifle, Haaretz reported Wednesday. The rifle is produced by…
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