Friday, April 19th 2024 |
By ALINA ADAMS
(Kveller via JTA) — It’s the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter and currently burning up other social media as well: Rachel Dolezal, who resigned on Monday as president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and who teaches African-American studies at Eastern Washington University, has allegedly been passing herself off as black, despite having been born to two white...
By STEVEN B. NASATIR
CHICAGO (JTA) — There are many important endeavors already underway to combat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, as the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman argues in his recent JTA Op-Ed (See “Comprehensive approach to fighting BDS is needed“). From educating and mobilizing our own community to engaging non-Jewish leaders and institutions, much work is being done.
But still more needs to be undertaken –...
By ABRAHAM FOXMAN
NEW YORK (JTA) — Let’s be clear from the outset: the BDS movement, the effort to support boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, is sinister and malicious and is having a negative effect on Jewish students on some campuses and on the wider Jewish community.
The origins of the movement lie in the highly organized and well-financed activities of anti-Israel activists who oppose the very concept of...
This piece was written by Iris and Ori Ifrach, Rachelli and Avi Fraenkel, and Bat-Galim and Ofer Shaer, the parents of Eyal Ifrach, Gilad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel.
(JTA) — One year ago, our families were thrust into a nightmare beyond anything we could have ever imagined.
Our sons, Eyal Ifrach, Gilad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel, had been kidnapped while making their way home from school. For 18 (chai) days, we hovered somewhere between...
By NOAM E. MARANS
NEW YORK (JTA) — The transformation of Catholic-Jewish relations over the past 50 years has been so successful that few today — neither Catholics nor Jews — know much about Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”), the landmark document that inaugurated historic changes in the Catholic Church’s relations with other faiths and whose 50th anniversary we mark this year.
Officially titled the Declaration on the Relations of...
By ALDEN SOLOVY
JERUSALEM (JTA) – On a sunny morning last month, I was swept into the women’s section of the Western Wall in Jerusalem in a flurry of aggression directed at the Women of the Wall, the Israeli group fighting for women’s prayer at Jerusalem’s holiest site.
One of the group’s male supporters, Charlie Kalech, was strangled and thrown to the ground. I was stomped on in the stomach...
By ABRAHAM H. FOXMAN
As someone who has been critical about the sometimes overheated reaction to what is taking place regarding Jews on campus, I also believe it is vital to monitor the situation closely and to be able to reevaluate as things may change.
I still believe that the vast majority of Jewish students have normal lives on campus where they can be comfortable in their...
By ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
(JTA) — The Newark riots of 1967 have shaped the imagination of the New York-New Jersey area for over 40 years — probably more than they shaped the actual political and social landscape of Newark and its suburbs.
The riots often are held up as a pivotal moment in the flight of Newark’s white community and the start of a spiral of poverty that persists today.
History,...
By DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ
(JTA) — This weekend, a collection of GOP presidential candidates will arrive in Las Vegas for a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition. But don’t allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that these candidates are making a real attempt to appeal to American Jewish voters. Their presence is all about winning over a single Jewish donor: Sheldon Adelson.
Obviously, these candidates are familiar with how...
By JESSICA LANG
NEW YORK (JTA) — The evening before we visited Auschwitz, over pizza with a group of young people in Oswiecim, the town on whose outskirts lies that infamous symbol, one of my students approached me with tears in her eyes.
Tears are hardly uncommon to visitors of sites of mass death. But for this student — a participant in a weeklong trip to Auschwitz undertaken as part...
