In a country like Israel, where regional conflicts and diplomacy are always dominating the headlines, a ministry with seemingly less relevance has caught the attention of Israeli citizens and American Jewry alike. The ministry for religious services, headed by Matan Kahana, a member of Prime Minister Naftali Bennet’s Yamina Party, has in recent months undergone…
The past two years have been utterly exhausting. Between working from home, supervising children doing Zoom school, sitting through quarantines and more, COVID-19 has unquestionably upended our daily routines. And as the parent of a daughter who immigrated to Israel while the rest of her family remained in the United States, I had to contend…
Corporations — and plenty of everyday people — treat Hanukkah as Jewish Christmas. It has a nice little story about miraculous oil, plus you decorate your house and give gifts. Even plenty of Jews feel this way; Hanukkah provides a way for us to participate in the music, media and cheer that dominates the Christmas…
Much is at stake — perhaps even the stability of the new Israeli government — in the race to head the Jewish Agency for Israel, the largest Jewish global nonprofit. And some of the contestants hope that winning the job, once held by former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Soviet dissident Nathan Sharansky, will…
On a recent warm night in Madrid, a young woman shared that she had travelled over 3,000 miles, leaving her husband and two young children in Montreal, to claim Spanish citizenship. Over glasses of the local Alhambra brew, she told me that her grandparents spoke Ladino, and that whenever someone would mention Spain around her…
If you arrived at Linke Fligl around 3 p.m. last Sunday and ambled into the tall grassy meadow at the heart of the farm, you would have seen something curious: A bunch of Jews squatting in patches of goldenrod, counting their blessings. They — or rather we, since I was among them — were saying…
The last 16 months have felt like an apocalypse movie at many points — a global pandemic, the attack on the Capitol, a massive drought and widespread forest fires in the Western U.S., even those murder hornets that briefly made headlines. Yet to artist and architect Daniel Toretsky, the catastrophes felt familiar; Jews have faced…
Read this article in Yiddish This week, a lobby was launched in the Knesset, urging the government to take responsibility for preserving Yiddish as a national language, and ultimately, for Israel to become the world center for Yiddish activity. A Knesset lobby is a group of Knesset members who want to enlist support for individuals…
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