Skip to Main Content
A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

Opinion

Eight thoughts, one for each night of Hanukkah

Eight thoughts, one for each night of Hanukkah

By Amy Fenster Brown, Special For The Jewish LightPublished December 18, 2022

Happy Hanukkah! The candles are lit, the wax is dripping, the latkes are sizzling, and the house will smell like it for a week. Let’s celebrate the miracle of Hanukkah with eight random thoughts, one for each night, from my brain to yours. I don’t...

Why Hanukkah is the holiday that American needs right now

Rabbi Isaiah Rothstein, JTAPublished December 15, 2022

(JTA) — As a young child I often wondered why people light the hanukkiah, or Hanukkah menorah, in so many different places. Some light the candles on their front porches and driveways, some in the streets, others at in city parks, and a very select...

Molly Yeh and Amy Fenster Brown

Doing good and having fun doing it

Published December 11, 2022

Editor’s note: Amy Fenster Brown was part of the Light’s 2015 Class of Unsung Heroes because of her outstanding volunteer contributions. Here, she writes about what she knows, though she isn’t one to tout her many achievements. It’s our favorite...

An Israel analyst’s best- and worst-case scenarios for the new right-wing government

Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTAPublished December 8, 2022

(JTA) — The recent Israeli elections, the fifth in less than four years, returned Benjamin Netanyahu to the driver’s seat for the third time. The twice and future prime minister appears able to cobble together a coalition that has been called the...

Your letters to the editor of the St. Louis Jewish Light

Your letters to the editor of the St. Louis Jewish Light

Published December 7, 2022

Stand up to book banning efforts In Nazi Germany, 25,000 books were burned in one night in 1933, the beginning of a series of censorship actions during the Holocaust. Now 90 years later, we are seeing a worrisome rise in censorship attempts across the...

USS St Louis (CL-49) bombarding Guam, July 1944.

The amazing story of Marty Barnes and the USS St. Louis at Pearl Harbor

Published December 6, 2022

Dear Reader, Today is Dec. 7th, the date President Franklin Roosevelt told us "will live in infamy" referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that killed 2,403 Americans. Since 2008, I've celebrated the life and the story of one Marty...

Stacey and Burt Newman.

“No one can tell you what grief is until you have to say goodbye for the final time”

By Stacey NewmanPublished November 30, 2022

Grief.  A concept one can’t fully know until it snakes around and pierces your heart like a rabid animal. I thought I was prepared for the inevitability of grief as I cared for my husband, Burt, with frontal temporal dementia (FTD) these past several...

A Black writer explores how U.S. and Germany differ in remembering their pasts

Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTAPublished November 29, 2022

(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained,...

Opinion: Trump’s Jewish supporters must condemn and disavow him

By Jonathan S. Tobin, Jewish News ServicePublished November 28, 2022

(JNS) If pro-Israel Republicans think former President Donald Trump will apologize or make amends in any way for choosing to have a public dinner at his Mar-a-Lago resort home with two notorious antisemites, they haven’t been paying attention to how...

Robert Clary in the episode Man in a Box. Courtesy Hogan's Heroes Fandom.

My favorite episodes of ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ featuring Robert Clary

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished November 21, 2022

Dear Reader, In the late 1970s, Spoede School let out at exactly 3:30 p.m. We would line up in the back and board our school buses for the ride home. I was on Bus #3, and Mr. Matt was our bus driver. Matt knew that he had exactly 30 minutes to get...

The exhausting, never-ending job of debunking antisemitic conspiracy theories

Andrew Silow-Carroll, JTAPublished November 21, 2022

(JTA) — A few days after the comedian Dave Chappelle appeared to justify the never-ending appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories, this sentence appeared in the New York Times: “Bankman-Fried is already drawing comparisons to Bernie Madoff.” I’ll...

Comedian Dave Chappelle courageously calls out antisemitism — and ADL is still upset about it

By Edward “Coach” WeinhausPublished November 16, 2022

Jews grouped together to form the state of Israel. They (we) run the place.  It is not crazy to think or say that. It is “delusional” to even think that “the Jews run Hollywood” even if there are “a lot of Jews there…I mean a lot.” And...

Load More Stories