(JTA) — In his March 20 speech to Israeli lawmakers, Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky invoked the Holocaust as analogous to what his country is currently experiencing.
“I have the right to this parallel and to this comparison,” he said...
Mark L. Shook, Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Temple Israel
• Published March 21, 2022
June 3, 2022, will mark fifty years since I was ordained a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio. Looking at photos taken at the time, I am appalled to realize I was wearing a powder blue polyester suit. In...
(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.
Natan...
Recently, I created a makeshift glossary of trendy teen lingo for you, and you’ve made it clear you want more. The tremendous feedback I’ve gotten from so many of you proves I’m not the only one who doesn’t understand what the kids these days...
IDIT KLEIN and IS PERLMAN
• Published March 14, 2022
(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.
Among over 100 pending anti-LGBTQ...
(JTA) — After decades of fearing that we would forget the horrors of our recent past, I am starting to fear the opposite possibility: that we Jews remember our history all too well but feel powerless to act on its lessons.
The Russian invasion...
(JTA) — Seventy-nine years ago this month, crowds twice filled Madison Square Garden for a pageant, “We Will Never Die,” meant to draw attention to the slaughter of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis. Screenwriter Ben Hecht organized the spectacle and...
(JNS) Like politics, wars can make for strange bedfellows. In the Second World War, even a staunch anti-Communist like Winston Churchill saw no problem with an alliance with the Soviet Union. Making common cause with a totalitarian state led by a mass...
(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...
AMY FENSTER BROWN, Special to the Jewish Light
• Published March 9, 2022
Not long ago I told you about book clubs I’d attended that didn’t exactly work out for me because reading the assigned book by the deadline was too much like homework. Homework was never really my strong suit. It probably was just the club part that...
(JTA) — Last week I stood at the Western Wall, on a beautiful sunlit Jerusalem day, and cried. I recognized how very privileged I was to stand in that holy place, but I also felt very alone in that moment. I was in my Jewish homeland, but away both...
(JTA) — For the past 20 years or so I could write confidently that the Jewish community was in a “post-rescue” era. Following the exodus of Soviet Jews, and the airlifts of Ethiopian Jews, Jewish organizations had to adjust to a reality –...
