President Biden has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to fill Justice Breyer’s seat on the Supreme Court. The nomination is no doubt historic: If confirmed, Judge Jackson would be the third Black Supreme Court justice and first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. When it comes to matters of church and state, issues…
One of the leading contenders to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer could be a demographic two-fer. Breyer, who announced Wednesday he was stepping down from the bench, was one of a handful of Jewish Americans on the Court. President Joe Biden has said he is committed to appointing the Court’s first Black female…
America in the midst of our holiday season — a time for family, rest and hotly contested litigation over religious displays on government property. For this year’s installment, we have a “tree lighting event” hosted by the Parent Teacher Association of the Carmel River Elementary School, a public school in Northern California. The event is…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — A key Supreme Court decision on religious freedoms earned praise from Orthodox Jewish groups, and has more liberal groups breathing a sigh of relief that its scope was narrow. On Thursday, the court issued a unanimous decision overturning Philadelphia’s policy of refusing to work with a Catholic agency that will not place…
The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that people can obtain monetary damages directly from employees of the federal government when suing over infringement of the First Amendment right to religious liberty. The ruling responds to a case filed by several Muslim men who said that FBI officers placed them on a no-fly list because they…
The Supreme Court blocked government restrictions on houses of worship imposed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a late night ruling Wednesday. Deciding two cases at once — one brought by Agudath Israel, an umbrella organization representing and advocating for haredi Orthodox Jews, and one brought by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn —…
Like many of my fellow Reform rabbis, I am deeply concerned about what the pending confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court might mean for our country. Barrett has historically stood against many of the fundamental rights and freedoms that the Reform Movement has supported for decades. Among those, and at the…
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What if he was wrong? I majored in history and went on to graduate school to study it even more. As taught, history was the story of human progress. Over that long arc, oppression, discrimination, poverty, war,…
