I’ve heard about more anti-Jewish attacks in the U.S. since Trump’s election under two months ago than I heard about my entire life prior to the election. It’s not just the magnifying effect of Facebook. Just this week, a synagogue in Santa Monica was vandalized with excrement, and white supremacists are devising a march with rifles in hand on a Jewish community in Montana.
When Rabbi Seymour Rosenbloom, a retired rabbi from Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, performed an intermarriage ceremony for his stepdaughter and her fiancé in 2014 more than a glass got shattered at the end of the wedding ceremony. Rabbi Rosenbloom’s membership in the Rabbinical Assembly wound up in pieces as well. In December 2016, the rabbinical body expelled him for disobeying the ban on rabbinic officiation at intermarriages. Not only officiating; also attending intermarriages, even those of close relatives, is asur (forbidden).
I’ll tell you a secret, I’m pleased about Christmas. That the whole world is willing to celebrate the late September birth of a nice Jewish boy on December 25, I’m kvelling.
The Christmas season is hard enough when your family is unambiguously Jewish; for us as an interfaith family, it was even more fraught…
Society is structured in such a way as to screw over new mothers. Banning abortion again won’t help.
The Israeli rabbinate has never shown any indication that we American converts matter — that is, until the election of the father of one of our own as president of the United States.
315Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro told Yeshiva University students that ‘transgender people are unfortunately suffering from a significant mental illness.’
189The holiday is about ancient Jewish resistance to assimilation — and American Jews celebrate it by assimilating more and more each year, Bethany Mandel writes.
79For starters, it’s creepy, Susan Katz Miller writes.
36In a bewildering twist, Spencer is wielding the very same golem metaphor that the media previously used to describe Trump’s growing power.
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