JVOICES.COM

The American Jewish World Service-AVODAH partnership wants you to self-define as an activist. Last night’s Inside the Activists’ Studio conference in New York (co-sponsored by Jvoices.com) set out to celebrate every kind of social consciousness, from choosing to buy fair trade coffee to going door to door for housing rights. Well over 100 Jewish activists [...]

Jen Chau, founder and director of SWIRL, (and an eagerly anticipated contributor to JVoices) will be presenting this Sunday at Inside the Activists’ Studio (which JVoices is a co-sponsor) on how activism needs a serious make-over, and tools for building a sustainable activist life. We caught up with her before the day’s event to ask [...]

On November 23, 2008, we held the first International Conference of Black Jews. We invited Jews of Nigerian, North American, Congolese and Israeli origin to compare our different ways of living our Judaism.
With this event, we wanted to illustrate the diversity present in Judaism, and to show that biological criteria are never involved in defining [...]

I was getting message after message Monday about the horrible NY Post article on Joy Ladin’s return to her work at Yeshiva University.
I didn’t want to write about it then. I was beyond annoyed at the sensationalist and grossly offensive reporting.
I was also beyond annoyed that many didn’t discuss her accomplishments as a writer. Joy [...]

Among all of the deeply rewarding elements of the pulpit rabbinate, none has been as meaning-filled, for me personally and on a broader communal level, as guiding the study and rituals of those who choose Judaism and the Jewish people as their own.
Each of the individuals who have invited me to join them — at [...]

Ah, those New York Jews.
Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Ed Koch, Alfred Kazin.
Katz’s Deli, Zabar’s, Pastrami Sandwiches, Lox and Bagels, Matzoh Ball Soup, Chopped Liver, Gefilte Fish.
The Lower East Side.
All one big Ashkenazi world.
I was once told a story by Mickey Kairey, one of the patron saints of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish [...]

The Christian Science Monitor has an article out this week by Patrik Jonsson discussing how “Conversions to Judaism among African-Americans are growing in a way that could affect the presidential election.”
Jonsson writes of a “black conversion movement,” portrayed as a recent trend of African-Americans becoming Jews by choice that reflects a particular moment in Black-Jewish [...]

The press release says it all. Mazel tov Robin!
New Media Award in Jewish Diversity
NPR Commentator and Duluth News Tribune Editorial Page
Editor Robin Washington is First Recipient
San Francisco - (May 28, 2008) - Robin Washington, the editorial page editor of Minnesota’s Duluth News Tribune and a television producer and National Public Radio commentator, is the first [...]