Robin Washington is the Forward’s Editor-at-Large. A longtime editor, columnist, radio host and documentarian across mainstream and ethnic media, he was one of the founders of the Alliance of Black Jews and an early pioneer of the term “Jew of color.” Email rwashington@forward.com, Twitter @robinbirk.
If there’s a definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, it’s “The Soiling of Old Glory” — Stanley Forman’s spot news winner for the Boston Herald American in 1976. In it, a youth turns an American flag into a weapon to use against a Black man at a school busing protest. Then again, make that two definitive photos:…
When Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa in 1966, he borrowed the concept of a menorah — and according to some accounts, he physically altered one — to invent the seven-candle kinara. A generation later, he gave something back to Judaism. An uncompromising 1960s revolutionary turned university professor, Karenga was already a cultural icon, and his holiday…
I have a confession to make: I just enjoyed a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie. Or, all right; I’ll qualify that: It was “Eight Gifts of Hanukkah” — the one outlier in Hallmark’s “Countdown to Christmas” series (re-airing Dec. 12, 10 a.m. Eastern). And one reason I liked it is I view the channel in a…
In a memorable moment of my journalistic career, I was thrown off the Mayflower II. More precisely, I was led off — as opposed to being forced to walk the plank — the replica ship in Plymouth Harbor by one of its crew member actors, who overheard me asking tourists about atrocities the Pilgrims committed…
The case was decided once the weapons charge was tossed
A shorthand voters’ guide for Tuesday’s mayoral election in Minneapolis could have defined the choice of candidates as left, left and lefter. The winner, incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey, was one of the lefts, even if he ran to the right. “For Minneapolis, Jacob Frey is a Republican,” Carin Mrotz, executive director of Minnesota’s Jewish Community…
The key to understanding the universe scientifically is questioning everything you think you know — which also happens to be one of the fundamental tenets of Judaism. That’s the conclusion Chanda Prescod-Weinstein reaches with her book, “The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred.” Describing her work as living “at the…
Qian Julie Wang is the author of The New York Times bestseller “Beautiful Country,” a moving memoir of her childhood as an undocumented Chinese immigrant in New York, written on her iPhone during her subway commute to her job as a lawyer. She is the founder and leader of the Jews of Color group at…
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