When a Holocaust survivor took the microphone last summer at a city council meeting in Mahwah, New Jersey, tensions were already running high. Hundreds of people filled the hall as Sami Steigmann, 78, sat before the township’s mayor and council. The meeting happened amid rising concerns by residents that ultra-Orthodox Jews were “infiltrating” their town…
It’s a fence, but it doesn’t exist six days out of the week. It’s a symbolic extension of the home, but not an extension of private property. It’s an ingenious legal loophole, but it’s been Jewish law for 1,500 years. It’s not a riddle, it’s an eruv: a boundary used by Orthodox Jews to expand…
I’m a non-Jewish Latina who works at the Anti-Defamation League. I love this work. I’m proud of this work. I’ve taken up the cause of fighting anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry because, as a Latina, I can’t simply be concerned with anti-immigrant or anti-Latino hate. To be effective in building a more equal and…
We may be at an inflection point, a moment when #MeToo becomes #WeToo, when the gender rules that have hurt and disadvantaged women for so very long are finally and substantively challenged. And if so — if the outpouring of painful recollections and apologies and resignations and outrage unleashed by the Harvey Weinstein story are…
One year ago this week, Sophia Wilansky stood on a bridge outside Bismarck, North Dakota, in a crowd of hundreds of protesters. Wilansky, then 21, had traveled to North Dakota to protest the construction of a natural gas pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. She planned to stay the winter. Instead, in the early…
In 1983, Kevin Wilshaw visited Dachau with three fellow neo-Nazis. He had traveled to Germany from England, his home country, and visited Hitler’s house and the Nuremberg Stadium in Munich with his German hosts. He asked them to take him to the nearby concentration camp. “They were very reluctant,” he said. They took him, and…
The sky was cloudless when the group gathered in the Old City of Jerusalem on Thursday morning to celebrate the ordination of four new Reform rabbis. But when they tried to enter the Western Wall complex, security guards physically accosted them, attempting to keep them from bringing Torahs onto the main plaza. In the ensuing…
If Roy Moore is guilty of sexual assault — and the evidence is mounting — that would constitute a stunning indictment of a leading candidate for the U.S. Senate, arguably, one of nation’s most prestigious and elite governmental bodies. And he might win anyway. Let that sink in for a moment. Republican officials are calling…
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