Syrian Refugees
With more than 500,000 people displaced to neighboring countries by the violent civil war in Syria, the Jewish Coalition for Disaster Relief (JCDR) has opened a fund to provide humanitarian aid to the refugees.
Vayigash: And He Approached
We need to know that we are loved, that there is a place where we are accepted without condition, where we can come home. We need to know that we can trust our loved ones. But despite the sanctity of family, who has not at some time questioned the fidelity of our family's love?
Rabbi Saperstein Submits Testimony on Hate Crimes
On August 6th, 2012 Wade Michael Page – identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as having ties to white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations – open fired at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wis
Are You Reading This on Your New iPhone 5?
Hey, I don’t know if you heard, but there’s a new iPhone. It’s supposed to be the thinnest smartphone in the world and it has a bigger screen!
Galilee Diary: All Our Children
We returned from the inspiring tour of the Galilee Jewish-Arab youth circus in the US to lurid headlines about a “lynch” in central Jerusalem, when a group of Jewish teenagers went from trading insults with Arab teens who happened to pass by, to beating them up, so badly that one was hospitalized in critical condition (in a similar event about a year ago, the victim did not survive).
Galilee Diary: One People
[The Eternal] will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Eternal your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Eternal your God will gather you, from there [God] will fetch you.
-Deuteronomy 30:3-4
Sukkah of Peace
The Voice of Jacob and the Hands of Esau
Tol'dot is a parashah of stories. It begins by narrating the birth of Jacob and Esau and ends with the account of Jacob's deception and the patriarchal blessing by the old, blind Isaac. These are familial stories about parents and siblings.
Strange Fruit
After seeing the infamous 1930 photograph by Lawrence Beitler, which depicts the mob lynching of two young black men, a Jewish high school teacher named Abel Meeropol wrote a haunting poem titled "Strange Fruit." The poem was first published in 1936 in The New York Teacher, a union magaz
Welcome to Questions
To the familiar "How odd of God to choose the Jews" we might well add, upon reading the story of Jacob/Israel, "But stranger still is Israel/It's odd indeed to be his seed/Part cheat, part mouse, yet we're his house/How come we're known as Jacob's own?"