Our Interests
“You will come around,” said a particularly dickish family friend as he dismissed my point about the importance of a social program out of hand. “You’ll grow out of this. It is against your interests.” He wasn’t the only person…
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Social Justice
In the 2010s, joining a shul became a political act. In more ways than one.
Rabbi Michael Rothbaum is the rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Acton, MA. He lives in Maynard with his husband, Yiddish singer Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell I’ve been teaching and working in synagogues since the early 1990s. My memories of…
5 Podcasts on Reproductive Rights that Will Vastly Improve Your Life in 2020
Whether you’re a casual consumer of podcasts or you break into a cold sweat at the thought of not having any at the ready, check out this roundup of podcasts and podcast episodes about abortion and reproductive rights. Each of…
Tisha B’Av #CloseTheCamps NYC Amazon action: a protest in pictures
Pictures by Gili Getz; text by Salem Pearce On Sunday, more than 1,000 Jews in New York converged on Amazon’s bookstore in Midtown Manhattan to protest the company’s role in supporting the efforts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to…
Bad speech comes in many forms: a look at “dangerous speech”
This article is part of a collaborative series commissioned by altMuslimah and Jewschool to promote interfaith dialogue and understanding between Muslim and Jewish communities experiencing a rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. If you’ve spent any amount of time on the…
Why I wanted a place at the Iftar table
Ruth Ebenstein, an American-Israeli journalist, public speaker and peace activist, is the author of the forthcoming memoir, Bosom Buddies: How Breast Cancer Fostered an Unexpected Friendship Across the Israeli-Palestinian Divide. Find her online at RuthEbenstein.com, on Facebook at Laugh Through Breast Cancer – Ruth…
Thoughts on the Religious Language of Jewish Social Justice: R. Kalonymos Kalman Shapira’s Derekh ha-Melekh on Expanding Torah to the Walls of the City
by Shaul Magid Shaul Magid is the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Kogod Senior Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, and rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue in Seaview,…
Who should be counted
Emily Strauss is a community organizer, and a frequent contributor to New Voices, Jewish Currents, The Forward, and Lilith magazine. For the second year in a row, the Trump administration failed to acknowledge June as LGBTQ pride month, neglecting to…
Does Judaism Have a Position On Privacy?
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…
A Messiah We Do Not Want to Come
These Sages help remind us to look at the chaos around us, to really see it, to analyze, it and begin to respond to it.