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Today is Tisha B’av, the ninth of the Jewish month of Av, a day when Jews traditionally remember the destruction of the Temples and other tragedies of our history by fasting and reading from the Book of Lamentations, culminating a three week period of remembering and mourning. As I fast, I am remembering the destruction that so many teachers, advertisements, politicians, a lobby group, and synagogues have tried to instruct me to ‘forget’ or not know: the destruction of Palestine. This destruction continues today, as we see the actions of modern day Israel in repressing freedom of speech, movement, and quality of life.

The UC Berkeley student government became an impassioned theater of views on the occupation of Palestine on April 14th. One Jewish attendee chronicles the all-night meeting about a divestment bill that spurred global debate.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

(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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]