Archive
On Saturday night, Nov. 5, 16 years and one day (on the secular calendar) since Yitzchak Rabin, prime minister of Israel, was assassinated, I visited Rabin Square. All was quiet. There were just a few other tourists straggling by. And me. That was about it. A few Israelis walking and biking by slowed down for […]
When I first saw Carole King’s new Christmas album I realized (with some guilt in my heart) that I had to buy it. It was nice, sweet, and simple. This was a real Christmas album, not completely abrasive like Bob Dylan’s Christmas album. But it wasn’t horribly fake like Barbra Streisand’s (titled “Christmas Memories” – […]
Who advocates for the minority within a minority? According to a press release posted to their Web site on November 21, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) – the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lobbyist organization in the United States – is launching the Jewish Organization Equality Index (JOEI) survey. The purpose of this study […]
My usual pre-Thanksgiving ritual doesn’t involve putting on stretch pants to allow for that last extra bite of stuffing. Neither does it involve watching the Macy’s Day Parade. Instead, before I head over to my grandparents’ house for Turkey Day with my family, I make sure to catch up on the latest episodes of my […]
Israel may field a baseball team for the next World Baseball Classic. Can you say ק-ו-פ-ק-ס ? The latest from the Global Jewish Voice: Sabra League Baseball By Gabriel T. Erbs in Portland Citing a recent ESPN article, Heeb Magazine reported that a slew of former MLB players met with Israeli baseball officials to discuss the potential of an […]
For the fifth consecutive year, Manhattan’s Jewish Community Center hosted the Other Israel Film Festival. A project devoted to exposing issues facing Israeli minorities, the festival brought together directors and films from Nov. 10-17 to “foster social awareness and cultural understanding,” according to the festival’s website. The festival included two Palestinian filmmakers this year. “We are constantly expanding and including other minority populations,” Isaac Zablocki, the JCC’s director of film programs, wrote in an email. The films shown at the festival represent the identities of many of contemporary’s Israel’s disenfranchised communities.
Last year, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) advised “conscientious filmmakers not to participate in this festival,” according to a release on its website. The organization’s concerns included allegedly propagandistic wording in official OIFF statements and “whitewashing” of what they call Apartheid-like practices in Israel.
I have always anxiously anticipated the arrival of Thanksgiving, filled with the promise of time with my family and some delicious turkey. But this year my excitement has taken a new form: for the first Thanksgiving of my life, I will be celebrating as a vegetarian.
By abstaining from turkey, which is often injected with hormones and antibiotics, and choosing instead to eat from the local fall harvest available in my area, it will be possible for me to observe Thanksgiving more ethically. The Thanksgiving holiday — which I choose to look at as a harvest holiday, rather than a commemoration of a mythical story about our Native American and Pilgrim ancestors — is the perfect opportunity to be thankful for nature’s bounty and the many gifts the earth gives us year after year.
Crossposted at Crystal Decadenz I am disturbingly familiar with the arguments against Orthodoxy. I imagine someone will take issue with my characterizations of the liberal branches, but it’s good to disagree sometimes. I know that really accurate characterizations would take a book to write (I’m telling you now so I don’t have to break up […]
In the first part of his watershed work, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E to 640 C.E., Seth Schwartz, the Gerson D. Cohen Professor of History at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, argues “that imperial support for the central national institutions of the Jews, the Jerusalem temple and the Pentateuch, helps explain why […]