(JTA) — Ah, summertime. A season to take a plunge in a mountain lake, read a trashy novel on the beach and reenact a historical tragedy through a month-long pageant of self-denial and fasting.

(JTA) — We’re about to see a liturgical convergence in the Islamic and Jewish calendars. On Sunday, Jews around the world will fast and mourn on Tisha B’Av, a day remembering the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem. On Monday, many Muslims will fast and mourn in observance of Ashura, rec…

(JTA) — Here’s a story I recently shared on Facebook: I was paddling my inflatable kayak on a lake in the Berkshires. Granted, it is not the sleekest or coolest-looking conveyance, but it gets the job done and it fits in the trunk of my car. At one point I passed two guys in a very lovely ca…

(JTA) – Back in December, human beings, a weird variety of uniquely frail, lithe and hairless monkeys, launched into space a new, $10 billion dollar telescope, 21 feet in diameter and, like many great temples, covered with golden mirrors.

When Adolf Eichman was on trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the court had documentation and testimony, but they also obtained more than 700 pages of transcripts of tapes, which Eichman himself recorded in Buenos Aires. The tapes were marked up with corrections in Eichmann’s own handwriting.

(JTA) — I have long been a keeper of women’s stories, many of which relate to fertility and reproductive choices, experiences generally shrouded in secrecy. While I am honored to be trusted with these personal accounts, I look forward to, and am working toward, a time when women will be able…

    “Six hundred thousand people on Ukraine’s contact line live in appalling conditions without electricty and gas, have intermittent water, face shelling and small arms fire on a daily basis, and don’t have access to a food market.”

(JTA) — There is an old joke about the Jewish atheist who is excited to meet the Great Heretic of Prague. He arrives at the great man’s house on a Friday night, and is immediately told to shush while the Heretic lights Shabbat candles. Then they sit down for the Shabbat meal, during which th…

We invite you to be our guest on Sunday, July 10, from 2-4 p.m., when the Jewish Federation of Omaha hosts an open house. This will include a guided Art Tour of the Staenberg Kooper Fellman Campus. Full disclosure: my name is on the program as co-chair with Shiri Phillips and we have a veste…

FRANKFURT, Germany (JTA) — I was born in Ukraine but have never considered myself Ukrainian. My parents had immigrated to Germany, seeking political and economic stability during the chaotic time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, and I still live here, in Frankfurt.  

Everybody called it 'Decoration Day' instead of 'Memorial Day.' To me, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was a holiday, a holiday which everyone I knew observed. Everything was closed, all the stores, all the restaurants, everything except one place--and I never went there. But I heard a…

JERUSALEM (JTA) — I was on a short visit to Israel last week, and spent time with a friend with whom I have been engaged in a 30-year argument. Elli Wohlgelernter and I met when he was the managing editor of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and I was a staff reporter. We would argue about the f…

(JTA) — Smoke from California’s fires is regularly bad enough to tint the sun on the other side of the country. Pakistan and India just experienced a devastating heat wave. In the Middle East, temperatures have risen by 1.5 degrees Celsius, more than twice the global average.

JTA — When I last spoke to Seth Pinsky in January 2020, soon after he was appointed CEO of the 92nd Street Y, he was looking forward to the challenge of taking over at a legacy New York Jewish institution — unaware that a pandemic was about to sweep away nearly all of the assumptions he brou…

(JTA) — For many younger Jews, being critical of Israel is itself a form of attachment. They may not consider themselves answerable to the Jewish state, but they definitely feel answerable for it in the eyes of the world. The same is true of some Jewish writers, including Michael Chabon and …

(JTA) — Last week, Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz responded to the draft U.S. Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, “A woman’s rights over her own body are hers alone.”

BUDAPEST, Hungary (St. Louis Jewish Light via JTA) — It has been more than a month since I fled Russia with my two daughters, a cat and a dog. Like thousands of other Russians horrified by the senseless war in Ukraine, we left with few suitcases and no plan.

(JTA) — When IKAR, the Jewish spiritual community where I serve as the director of community organizing, realized our long-held dream of buying land in Los Angeles so that we could build a home for ourselves, we invited the community to imagine what we’d like to see included as part of this …

(JTA) — The past few days I couldn’t stop crying about the situation in Ukraine. Watching the news, reading articles and hearing reports took me to dark moments in my past. My heart broke to see people being victims again in a war that they did not choose to be part of.

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(JTA) — Late last year, months before a Russian missile landed near the Babyn Yar memorial outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, the site’s foundation announced plans for a new museum to honor the 33,771 Jews slaughtered there by the Nazis in September 1941.

(JTA) — As we approach Purim – a holiday that honors the courage to be our true selves – we are alarmed by the surge of legislative attacks on the rights, safety and dignity of LGBTQ youth across the nation.  

(JTA) –The Russian invasion of Ukraine, justified by Vladimir Putin as necessary to “denazify” the country and stop “genocide,” outraged me for its blatant assault on a people, and on truth. But as I thought about his previous misuses of history, I should not have been so surprised.

BERLIN (JTA) – I watch what is happening in Ukraine and I feel helpless, scared for the state of the world, terrified for my friends and former students and anxious about the future of the place that I called home for nearly four years of my life.

This article first appeared on Alma.

(JTA) — Art Spiegelman once complained that “Maus,” his classic memoir about his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, was assumed to be intended for young adults because it took the form of a comic book.

(JTA) — Like many people, I encountered “Maus” as a middle schooler. But unlike many people, I can say that it set me on a direct path to my eventual career — as a scholar of religion, especially Judaism, and popular culture.

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(JTA) — Saturday’s assault on a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, has renewed the familiar yet always harrowing question: How should Jews combat antisemitism?

(JTA) — This year, everyone seemed to have an opinion about how the entertainment industry views Jewish women.

(JTA) — A long-simmering conflict between CAIR, the Muslim-American civil rights organization, and the Anti-Defamation League has now reached the boiling point: A Bay Area CAIR leader dismissed the ADL and groups like it as “polite Zionists” who could not be trusted as allies. The ADL’s CEO,…

(JTA) — How do you fight antisemitism if you can’t agree on how to define it? And how do you begin to debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campus if activists on both sides are convinced of the other’s animosity?

Can you believe Hanukkah is almost here? I can’t. As I’m writing this, there are a million things to do and not enough time. Life has been getting frantic again, something I vowed I wouldn’t let happen after COVID-19. This was a chance to learn, I thought; we don’t have to be this busy all t…

(JTA) — Thanksgiving seems to have all the right ingredients for a holiday that most American Jews can embrace: It doesn’t fall on Shabbat, its roots and message are nonsectarian, and its only real ritual is a multi-course meal. 

(JTA) — “Why does everybody hate us?” My son Izzy asked me this question after a man with a machete attacked Jews at a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York, in 2019. Izzy was 12 years old when he flopped onto the couch, kicked up his feet and asked the question no Jewish parent wants to hear.

This article originally appeared on Alma. 

This article originally appeared on Alma.

JTA) — In 1916, in the picturesque German village of Heinebach, a 14-year-old girl named Elisabeth Schmidtkunz penned a sweet message in her classmate Jenny Katz’s autograph book.

Four Jewish friends were in a cafe. One exclaimed, “oy.” The second sighed, “oy vey.” The third moaned, “oy veyzmir.” The fourth said, “if you fellas don’t stop talking about politics, I am out of here!”

(JTA) — I’ve spent most of the last decade focused on grassroots organizing and capacity building inside the American progressive movement. From helping build the largest leadership development organization on the left, to launching a first-of-its-kind organization to mobilize male allies in…

This article originally appeared on Alma.

(JTA) — I grew up Jewish in Alaska. The Jewish community in Anchorage, the city where I grew up, did things their own Jewish way. It was the only kind of Judaism that I knew.

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(New York Jewish Week via JTA) — Our oldest son is named Noah, and as a result we collected a lot of children’s books based on the Bible story (which will be read in synagogues this Shabbat). On its face, the story of Noah and the flood, with its parade of animals, is just right for kids. In…

Judaism has two major week-long holidays, but one goes largely unobserved in the diaspora.  While the Passover Seder has become a touchstone of Jewish identity, the same cannot be said for a meal in a sukkah.  The situation is understandable.  The High Holidays grab all one’s attention, leav…