During my week in El Salvador with the Takkana Social Justice Fellowship and the American Jewish World Service (AJWS), I was constantly plagued by the knowledge that my life was changing as every moment passed. Through the generosity of individual donors,...

AN ATTACK ON IRAN IS NEEDED I wholeheartedly concur with those who predict that Israel will launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities by the end of this year, and truth be told, I overwhelmingly endorse such an attack. The fate and...

For weeks now the controversy about Agriprocessors, the kosher meat and poultry plant in Postville, Iowa, has been in the media. Questions abound regarding the treatment of workers, the presence of foreign workers with falsified documents, etc. All of...

News reports from The New York Times, the JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), the Associated Press and other sources detail the fact that Israel has allowed entry to scores of Palestinians fleeing a Hamas factional crackdown in the Gaza Strip. Apparently...

Many of us try to run our children's and grandchildren's lives, to the extent we can. And this is no recent phenomenon. In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Portia laments, "I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike; so is the will...

Archbishop Raymond Burke, after a four-and-a-half year tenure as spiritual leader of the 500,000-member Roman Catholic community of Greater St. Louis, will leave that post at the end of August to accept a major appointment at the Vatican as Chief Justice...

Different strokes for different folks, I know. While Jewish law does not accept same-sex relations, I understand that some people perceive themselves to be homosexuals. I am not homophobic, and do not at all intend for this letter to be an indictment...

Anti-Semitism has often been called "the oldest hatred". At differing times in history, it has taken differing forms, some more obvious, as with quotas for Jewish students in colleges and universities up to the 1960s, through discrimination in employment...

I recently returned from three weeks in Israel. As much as I enjoyed spending time with friends and family, this trip was bittersweet. On July 2, only a day after I arrived, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem killed four and wounded over fifty when...

Just one year ago I would have never expected to travel to Israel -- twice. The first time was in July of 2007, when I was able to attend a professional seminar at the Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Educators of different ages, cultures, countries,...

Before Hurricane Katrina hit, New Orleans had a Jewish population of about 10,000, about one percent of the general population. After Katrina, it was 7,500. The drop in numbers is proportional to the general population before and after Katrina. New Orleans...

RJC ad prompts response I am writing to protest the inclusion of the advertisement run by the Republican Jewish Coalition with the headline "I used to be a Democrat" in the Jewish Light. The ad speaks for itself. It is full of silly, meaningless generalities...