Ruth Messinger is the former borough president of Manhattan, and a social justice consultant to several Jewish organizations.
Ruth Messinger
By Ruth Messinger
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Opinion Don’t Sign Uganda Anti-Gay Law
The following is an open letter to Uganda President Yoweri Museveni Dear President Museveni: This week I received a call for help from your people that I cannot ignore. My lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender friends and colleagues in Uganda are frightened, and I am concerned that they have every reason to be. Over the…
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Opinion Anne Heyman’s Remarkable Life of Service
Anne Heyman put together a life of immense complexity with apparent ease because she knew who she was, what she cared about and what she wanted to accomplish. Anne loved her family passionately and cared tremendously that her children grow up with a global perspective and with the capacity to care for others. She was…
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Opinion Giving Women a Voice Is Powerful Message for High Holidays
Each year when I sit in synagogue during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I’m struck by the complex stories we read about biblical women and by the wisdom these stories offer about ensuring the dignity of women and girls today. The past year was one of paradoxes. At a time when Sheryl Sandberg, Malala Yousafzai,…
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Food Facing a Food Crisis: The Ingenuity of Haitian Farmers
With Passover around the corner, many of us are poised to recite the words, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” But when nearly 1 billion people around the world are hungry or malnourished, these words become acutely daunting—particularly for communities recovering from disasters. More than three years after a major earthquake ravaged Haiti,…
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Opinion Applying American Law to Far-Off Crimes
The Obama administration recently took a troubling stance against victims of human rights abuses in a brief filed with the Supreme Court. The administration asked the Supreme Court to place strict limits on the reach of the Alien Tort Statute, an important law allowing people to file civil suits in American courts for violations of…
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Life A Jewish Feminism for Global Challenges
This is the seventh entry in an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. As a child in the 1940s and ’50s, I unknowingly experienced Jewish feminism before it really existed. Beginning in 1938 my mother, Marjorie Wyler, worked full-time as the Jewish Theological Seminary’s director of public relations, radio and television; it was a position she…
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Opinion American Food Policy Harms Neediest
Food plays a central and sensory role in our lives and serves as a map of our history. Meals, recipes and the acts of eating and drinking teach us about who we are, where we live and where we come from. But at a time of the year when apples and squash flood our tables…
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Opinion In Uganda, a Hate That We Must Confront
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once said that Judaism “takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest.” During the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded of the urgent need for American Jews to make this formulation real as I’ve turned my attention to a flagrant threat to human rights in Uganda. Since October, the Ugandan…
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