President Donald Trump’s missile strike against Syria inaugurates a new chapter in the long and controversial history of American responses—and sometimes non-responses—to mass murder around the world.Although the killing of Syrian civilians by President...
By Rabbi James Stone Goodman
• Published April 13, 2017
The week I am writing this, we launched another effort to break the stigma surrounding mental illness in St. Louis (March 19 at the Jewish Community Center of St. Louis), the week after a well-circulated article appeared in The New York Times (“Table...
Proposed cuts would devastate aid programsThanks to the Jewish Light for publishing Cynthia Changyit Levin’s insightful letter about the proposed cuts to global development programs (“Opposing cut to global aid programs” by Cynthia Changyit Levin,...
You didn’t read about it in the New York Times or hear about it on “CBS Evening News.” The European Union didn’t praise it, and the United Nations didn’t acknowledge it. But last week, Israel dismantled yet another Jewish settlement.Of course,...
Fellow parents, I think we've been sold a bill of goods. Parenting has always been hard, but these days, people of our generation knock themselves out in the name of giving our kids “every opportunity." We spend our lives shuttling from one music or...
Yair Lapid is the current favorite to become prime minister the next time the Israeli people go to the polls to elect a new Knesset, at some point in the not-too-distant future. But whether or not the former television star who leads the centrist Yesh...
After the Soviet Union officially collapsed at the end of 1991 and became the Russian Federation, there seemed to be a chance that it might emerge from a difficult transformation as a democracy. Less than a decade later, new Russia had slipped back into...
Is President Donald Trump a bigot, as many of his detractors claim? He surely has many flaws, some of which I often have written about — for example, his careless, even reckless, unpresidential tweets. But I doubt bigotry is one of them, at least based...
By Rabbi Carnie Shalom Rose
• Published March 30, 2017
Even after 21 years in the rabbinate, I am still (pleasantly, of course) astonished by the number of phone calls and emails I receive in the weeks leading up to Passover. Many of these queries are from members of our shul and the extended Jewish community...
Opposing cuts to global aid programsThe White House is proposing drastic cuts to global development programs in our national budget. This would be disastrous for people struggling in poverty and for the U.S. standing as a world leader. Currently, millions...
Kyle Gersman, JTA via the Forward
• Published March 24, 2017
Last week, Ohio State University Hillel was accused of being anti-LGBT because it was forced to disassociate with a Jewish LGBT campus group, B’nai Keshet, after the group decided to co-sponsor a fundraiser for queer refugees with Jewish Voice for Peace....
By Rabbi James Stone Goodman
• Published March 22, 2017
I spent the year of 1976-77 as student in Jerusalem. There I was introduced to the oud, the double course, 10- or 11-string ancestor to the lute, the microtones that distinguish the music of the eastern Mediterranean articulate on the fretless neck of...
