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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 they were looking for “the rioters, the criminals, and everyone who was involved in the events, in or...

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 define for neighbors what it meant to be Jewish. "It was a privilege, because very few Jewish people are...

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 life would be built on her own terms. After six months, my mother returned to New York. She shared an a...

(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 diseases of the body, mental illness still carries with it a stigma and prejudice that prevents so many fr...

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 report, some of the fallout may well affect the Jewish community. How should we react? Many Jews feel...