We’re facing a humanitarian and moral crisis right now because of our country’s immigration policies. Don’t be fooled by the executive order that the president signed on Wednesday. The administration claims that the order ends the family separation policy, but it will in fact still separate families. And it makes no provisions...
The Trump administration’s recently announced “zero tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings has led to an emotion-laden national conversation on the government’s responsibility for the welfare of children who are brought across the U.S. border by their parents. The new policy requires that all border crossers entering the U.S. without a legal...
Emily Strauss is a community organizer, and a frequent contributor to New Voices, Jewish Currents, The Forward, and Lilith magazine. Despite the increasing focus on intersectionality within progressive spaces, religion is often a blind spot, causing even interfaith work to leave behind communities that are not Christian. Over the course of the...
Hannah Ehlers currently lives in DC. She attended American University where she majored in Jewish Studies. Ehlers is Development Associate at the New Israel Fund, a non-profit dedicated to strengthening democracy and equality in Israel and to ending the occupation. During my freshman year of college, I read Roth’s Operation Shylock: A...
The Anti-Imperialism of Fools: Why the Jewish Left Needs to Take Globalization Seriously — Mark my words Mr. Dedalus, he said, England is in the hands of Jews. In all the highest places; her finance, her press. And they are signs of the nation’s decay. Wherever they gather they eat up a...
“And if human beings are only wild animals, may I be able to turn them toward mildness and humility.” On May 21, the White House issued an abominable document defining people as animals. In recent weeks, the Israeli government has killed dozens of protesters and injured many more, all from a distance,...
IN THE ORCHARD By Julia Knobloch I say my blessings in the orchard, I have turned over the soil. I give with dubious hands; the intention does not count. We remain a forbidden junction, peaches and almonds. I have only been here four years and you since Abraham. You want a...
After the Exodus, Torah was revealed at Sinai, and our ancestors had to figure out how their lives would be different after their liberation from Mitzrayim. The Vision for Black Lives policy platform is similarly a revelation, a vision of how we can be different with each other as we continue marching...
Every day, millions of Jews pray multiple times per day, in the set of blessings known as the Amidah, for the return to, and rebuilding of, Jerusalem and reestablishing there the Glory of King David. It is time to rethink that blessing. In a world in which Jerusalem has not only been...
Let’s talk about Judaism and privacy. Over the past several of decades, it’s been very common for technological advances to be matched by corresponding halakhic conversations; there are attempts to find the “Jewish take” on heart transplants, or IVF, or Alexa, or nuclear weapons, or whatever. It’s a good and quite modern...