Sitting at my Shabbes dinner table on a Friday night during the plague, I learned that Spanish had two words for assassin. The first was asesino and the second was sicario. According to the dictionary, sicario is more of a hitman, while asesino is an assassin. A distinction without a real difference....
DeSean Jackson of the Philadelphia Eagles and NBA veteran Stephen Jackson provided a one-two punch this week with the posting and defending of a virulent anti-Semitic screed. While he attributed his words to Hitler (and as it turns out even Hitler hadn’t said them!) DeSean Jackson’s statement of apology insisted that his...
More than 70 years since the Nakba, and more than 50 years since it militarily occupied the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is planning to officially annex further parts of the West Bank in “undoubtedly, the most significant move it has made since it occupied it in 1967.” Originally announced to be formally...
On June 29th, the US Supreme Court voted in favor of protecting abortion access when it ruled against an attempt by the state of Louisiana to prevent doctors from providing abortion unless they had admitting privileges at hospitals within in 30 miles of where they treated patients. (For more on this case,...
Whither morality in this moment of Annexation? Is it withering? Or is it reviving? For decades, Israelis and Jews around the world have been taught that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is the “most moral army in the world.” Derived from the concept of “purity of arms,” the Spirit of the IDF...
Hannah Smith is a Master’s student at Stanford University in Latin American Studies. This week I opened my drawer at my family’s home in Maryland to find the t-shirt I received upon my acceptance to Stanford four and a half years ago. The back of the t-shirt taunted me – “We have...
There is a Jewish folktale from Egypt called “Elijah’s Violin” and I had to go track it down after I, along with so many, became aware of the heartrending story of Elijah McClain. One year ago, McClain suffered fatal injuries at the hands of arresting officers in Colorado who held him...
If the annexation debate has achieved anything, it has proved one thing: the mainstream American Jewish community is dead. It is failing all of us, right, center, or left. Community Failures Mainstream organizations like the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, Conference of Presidents, and others that have long claimed to represent...
Protests have been taking place across the US over the last three weeks in response to the continuation of police killings of unarmed black people. George Floyd, a 46 year-old black man whose murder has been at the center of the demonstrations, was killed by Minneapolis police officers on May 25th. He...
I stand at the intersection of many competing and sometimes incongruent identities finding it hard to breathe. I say this acknowledging that I am able to breathe and am alive while others like George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor and more have been murdered....