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This Saturday night (March 6 2010) will witness one of the most important demonstrations in years, in the struggle for human rights and justice here in Israel. The struggle against injustice and dispossession, against the Hebronization of East Jerusalem, and against the anti-democratic processes undermining Israeli society. In this struggle, Sheikh Jarrah has already become [...]

The following drash/sermon was given during Yom Kippur at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav.
I love being Jewish. I always have. From the moment I knew I was Jewish, I found a home in the prayers, larger-than-me concepts, values and sense of community that were infused in everything we did. I was aware, however, that I was different [...]

It was hard to tune into the Sotomayor confirmation hearings without hearing mention of the now-infamous “wise latina” comment. Even though, as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told her, “Unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re gonna get confirmed,” not a single day passed without continuous pestering from the Right.
But lets take that comment [...]

As Dahlia Lithwick noted in Slate this past weekend, Guantanamo may be America’s most infamous “prison problem,” but it is far from our only one.
Our sentencing and incarceration system is broken. With the U.S. having only 5 percent of the world’s population and yet almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, we are imprisoning people [...]

(reposted from S. Bear Bergman’s blog)
Call For Submissions
GENDER OUTLAWS: THE NEXT GENERATION
Kate Bornstein & S. Bear Bergman, eds
Deadline: 1 September 2009
In the fifteen years since the release of Gender Outlaw, transgender narratives have made their way into cultural locations from the margins to the mainstream and back again. Today’s trannies and other sex/gender radicals are [...]

Boston Review has a new article up about U.S. antisemitism and the economic crisis.
The authors, Neil Malhotra and Yotam Margalit, researchers at Stanford Business School, conducted a study about how
anti-Semitic sentiments might relate to the ongoing financial crisis.
by asking 2,768 American adults questions like
“How much to blame were the Jews for the financial [...]

Congratulations to our own Cole Krawitz, founder of jvoices.com
Pakistani American teen wins top honor in international journalism
contest, prevailing over entries from major U.S. newspapers
National Public Radio, The Forward and jvoices.com also win honors

Yasmeen Malik, a Pakistani American high school senior whose column in a teen newspaper told of her conversion to Judaism at 12 years [...]

JVoices is co-sponsoring an exciting upcoming free event in the San Francisco Bay Area! Here’s the scoop…
I recently got a piece published in Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal. It’s an essay I co-authored with my friend Nzinga, about our experiences as African American Jews. She converted to Judaism, and I was born Jewish; so, in [...]

Editor’s Note: We received feedback about an earlier post (“Freund’s Business of Farming Jews,” March 23) from Michael Freund, who was a subject of the piece. We asked the author, David Ramírez to read and respond to Freund. We are publishing both of their responses below.
Can David Ramírez Let Go of his Hate?
By Michael Freund
In [...]

(JVoices.com brings you the full Haggadah, In Search of Freedom: Exploring Common Ground Passover Haggadah, for the first time online.)
For the 14th year, the Milwaukee Area Jewish Committee’s African-American-Jewish Task Force held its annual African-American Jewish Seder. The seder has been led in synagogues, university libraries, senior centers, Jewish homes for the elderly, but [...]