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This School Year Not Another Shooting
The beginning of the school year for me has always been filled with the comfort of the early September winds and the coming High Holy Days. With the first day of classes brings with it new teachers, classrooms, and friends. Dipping apples in honey, smelling the musty reticence of the shofar, and walking along the beach throwing breadcrumbs give me the sense of clean slate, a new start and a new year.
Introducing the New Eisendrath Legislative Assistants
It might not be 5775 just yet, but we know that this new year will be filled with sweetness, joy, and of course, justice. We are so thrilled that the 2014-2015 class of Eisendrath Legislative Assistants is here, ready to dive into their issues and join with our Movement to l'taken et haolam (repair the world). This bright, inquisitive, thoughtful class is already heading to their first coalition meetings, staffing projects, getting started on programming, and getting to know the ways of the RAC and Washington, D.C. We so look forward to the work they will do this year! From left to right in the group picture, they are:
Incidence of anti-Semitism in Baltimore over Rosh Hashanah
As we begin the new Jewish year, these Yamim Noraim (Days of Awe) are a time for us to reflect on the year that was and renew our commitments to tzedakah (justice) and tikkun olam (repairing the world). We also mark these days by heading to our synagogues to pray as a community, which is why it was even more disheartening to hear about a possible hate crime at a synagogue in Baltimore over Rosh Hashanah. According to reports, a man yelled out in front of a synagogue and shot a BB gun in the vicinity of the building.
Putting a Face on Climate Change
Fourteen years ago I was a coordinator for the national Million Mom March for sensible gun legislation.
Putting a Face on Climate Change
by Barbara Lerman-Golomb
Fourteen years ago I was a coordinator for the national Million Mom March for sensible gun legislation. At a Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL) conference a few months later in Washington, DC, I addressed the group saying that what we needed was a march to protect the planet.
At the Million Mom March we invited families who had lost a loved one to gun violence up to the stage on the Washington Mall. One by one they shared their stories about a parent, a brother, a child who had been killed. Over time, we’ve come to understand that gun violence is an issue of public health. Similarly, I thought at an eco march, we could have individuals whose lives and health had been impacted by environmental degradation and assaults on their air, land and water, tell their stories—all in an effort to put a face on climate change.
This Week at the RAC: Apply for Nothing but Nets Fellowship; People's Climate March
As we finish up the last full week of our Jewish year, it’s been typically hopping at the RAC. Our program team of Michael Namath, Shira Zemel, Daniel Landesberg and Ariella Yedwab spent three days at the URJ’s Kutz Camp brainstorming, role-playing and case-studying along with the URJ’s Youth Division Staff, all with an eye to making our many youth-oriented RAC programs (L’Taken, Machon Kaplan, etc.) even better than they already are. Back here in DC, the LAs were zipping around from congressional hearings to mark-ups to meetings to briefings on Israel, voting rights, religious freedom and more.
Anticipating Enrollment Season, New Statistics on the ACA
In the battle over the efficacy of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, numbers are key for measuring the successes and failures of health care reform. From the number of Americans with insurance to the to the average cost of health care a year, these numbers will be used by both supporters and opponents of recent health care reforms to both praise and criticize the impact of Obamacare. This month the Census Bureau and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released important statistics that both paint a picture of health care enrollment in the United States and serve as a baseline for judging the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the years to come. While the increase in insurance coverage is a positive sign, the racial disparities illustrated by these statistics offer an important reason as to why we must fight to expand coverage and accessibility for all.
Ghetto: A Poem
the path that we now follow / is the Exodus our ancestors never chose / flooding with pain they died not to swallow / the past spills into the river and flows
Celebrating a Milestone for VAWA
By Debbie Rabinovich
This week marks a major milestone for me: I am turning 18. The Big One-Eight. I love the number 18. The number 18 means that I get to vote. I can donate blood. I can go on Birthright. In Hebrew, the number 18 is the gematria for the word chai, or life.
One thing I like to do on birthdays is look up the date to see what else happened on that day in history. On my own birthday, September 13th, plenty of bad things happened. The first fatal automobile accident. The death of critically acclaimed rap artist Tupac Shakur. However, one really good thing happened: the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was passed. VAWA is just a little bit older than me; in fact, the Act reaches a major milestone this week as well: its 20th anniversary. I am lucky to have lived my whole life in a world where our government recognizes that domestic violence is a moral abhorrence all too prevalent in our society.
“Women’s Issues” Are Everybody’s Issues: Preventing Sexual Assault is On All of Us
Tomorrow, President Obama and Vice President Biden will announce a new campaign to prevent sexual assault on college campuses. Entitled “It’s On Us,” the campaign will emphasize that it is the responsibility of every person in a community to help prevent sexual violence. Drawing on a recent report from the National Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault, the campaign strives in particular to engage male students, harnessing their potential to help prevent sexual assault by shifting peer behavior and, accordingly, community norms.