Page 5 - While Jews News Today

Israeli officers blindfold a Palestinian citizen of Israel during violent confrontations in Lydd, central Israel. (Oren Ziv) In a surprise campaign on Monday, Israeli authorities launched “Operation Law and Order,” in which thousands of national police officers, Border Police members, and army reservists arrested hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel accused of participating in this month’s mass wave of protests. In their announcement to the press, the Israeli police claimed that the...

Growing up in tiny Cary, Mississippi during the 1960s and 1970s, Deborah Lamensdorf Jacobs thought a lot about what it meant to be Jewish. Her family came to the Mississippi Delta in the late 19th century. Her early relatives, like many of the small population of Jews who have longed called the South home, owned stores. In 1919, her grandfather bought 100 acres of land to farm cotton. As one of few Jewish people in her small town, Lamensdorf Jacobs knew what she did and what she said would defi...

Miraculously, my mother did what almost no one else in her large family could: She survived WWII. She arrived at New York’s Ellis Island in 1946, still a teenager. Orphaned, dispossessed of everything and knowing no English, she lived first in Toronto with her older sister, Jean, who’d left Poland a decade before the war when my mother was still an infant. A seamstress in a factory, Jean became the devoted, sometimes nagging, older sister my mother had never known. But my mother’s new lif...

(Courtesy of St. Mary’s General Hospital) As COVID-19 persists in our everyday lives, we are very machmir in complying with pandemic regulations—masks, social distancing, vaccinations. However, we are missing the big picture of another pandemic that is amongst us—serious mental health issues. It wasn’t so long ago that people only spoke in whispers about cancer, even though it is one of the top health issues in our world. And while today we can speak freely about cancer and other diseas...

Should we support the CRED Report? By Joshua Reuben Last week saw the publication of the report by the Committee on Race and Ethnic Disparities, chaired by Tony Sewell. Many of the more controversial conclusions were leaked and attacked in advance,  including downplaying the impact of institutional racism,  disagreeing with many of the concepts of critical race theory (“CRT”), and discouraging the use of the term BAME (black and minority ethnic). While Jews were not mentioned in the rep...

Protesting against techno: How a concert revealed the state of Palestinian society January 14, 2021 Share Until December 26, 2020, techno music was not a common topic of conversation in Palestine. That changed when Sama Abdulhadi, a famous techno DJ, gave a concert at Maqam Nabi Musa that provoked a backlash from religious conservatives. Abdulhadi, who is a Palestinian living abroad, decided to return to her homeland to perform three concerts that would be streamed on Beatport, a websi...

Jan. 11, 2021 The Hamdoun family has lived near Kibbutz Lotem in the Western Galilee since the early part of the last century. They are very familiar with the area, and with the plants, fruits and vegetables each season brings there. While most members of the nearby kibbutz, which was founded in the late 1970s, relied on more conventional agricultural methods, the Hamdouns continued to gather and eat produce from their surroundings as they had done for millennia. At Kibbutz Lotem, we recently m...