Yesterday I was floored by the callous disregard for justice – no, I’m used to that. What I was floored by was its blatentness. To have the only charges be for the walls of the neighbors’ apartments, and none for the senseless and terrible death of Breonna Taylor. At this time of...
The Torah gives just one unique commandment for Rosh HaShanah, to hear the sound of the Shofar, producing that raw, emotionally complex, array of sounds that evoke: the summoning of courage for dangerous battle (such as before Jericho’s walls came a-tumbling down), the awe accompanying realization of the implications of freedom and...
Worried about where the Kyle Rittenhouses and white militias/vigilantes will take us? Or maybe worse, are you not worried about it, thinking (hoping) it’s just a small group of people who will always be on the margins? No matter where you come down, it is worth all of us focusing for a...
by Aryeh Bernstein This devar torah for Parashat Ki Tavo and Labor Day was first written internally for the Avodah Service Corps, for which the author is National Jewish Educator. Around the world, Jews are nearing the conclusion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. This week’s portion, Ki Tavo (Deuteronomy/Devarim...
Ian S. Lustick, Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Almost half a century ago, in the early 1980s, many pundits warned that the window for creating two states was closing. Israeli geographer Meron Benvenisti, for example, described the situation as “five minutes to midnight.”...
A conversation with Pastor Cue Jn’Marie, a former Virgin Records rapper, turned evangelist, activist and organizer, and Rabbi Dr. Aryeh Cohen, of the American Jewish University and Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, about the history and context of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the movement to defund the police in Los...
CHE serves as a signal that Judaism’s language was important to support the “imagined community” of international Jewry. It’s less about learning a functional language, the authors argue, but rather helping campers and junior staff understand that Hebrew, the language of the Jewish people was worth knowing, and valuable enough to integrate...
Jeanette Friedman is a journalist and Jewish activist who has written on a vast array of Jewish and secular subjects for more than 50 years. Her crowning achievement is her son, Daniel Sieradski. (Shani Mor did an exceptionally nasty piece aimed at Seth Rogen’s masculinity and American Jews who are not rabid...
The same opening paragraph could be written for every article this summer: We are tired, stir-crazy, afraid. The world is scary (a flimsy word to describe what it actually is). It all feels like too much, because it is too much. And the same advice could be given at the end of...
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....