JERUSALEM (JTA) — For millennia, Jews longed for a return to their ancient homeland, Zion. But for much of modern history, a considerable number of Jews dreamed instead of a vibrant life as a minority in cosmopolitan nation-states. 

As a longtime teacher, I have been contacted by friends, family and acquaintances asking me to help them decide between choosing virtual learning or an in-person learning plan for their children. Like many parents, my head is spinning. 

So many of us feel powerless these days. Two inter-connected and seemingly intractable issues — the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and the call for racial equity — challenge our Jewish values of preserving human life and protecting the vulnerable. It’s time to exercise the power of the ballot …

PALO ALTO, Calif. (JTA) — As a child, I always looked forward to Tisha B’Av, as weird as that may sound.

Over the past 48 hours, my social media outlets have blown up over recent anti-Semitic comments made by an Eagles footballer, DeSean Jackson. I have seen many of my white Jewish colleagues, students, friends and public leaders come out publicly denouncing and calling out the anti-Semitic com…

The American Jewish community, like the rest of the nation, has lost a dear friend and an authentic hero in the recent passing of Rep. John Robert Lewis. The Georgia Democrat, who began life as the son of sharecroppers and became a towering figure in the civil rights movement and American po…

WASHINGTON  (JTA) — During my four years as the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, I was exposed on numerous occasions to one of the great truisms of the past few centuries of Jew-hatred. There are two forms of evils that are frequently, inextricably linked…

ST. MICHAELS, Maryland (JTA) — The day is one of my most vivid and treasured memories. I was associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and we were in the middle of our flagship public policy conference. One of my responsibilities was to assign Reform Movement leade…

The nation is struggling with having to choose between bad options.

SILVER SPRING, Md. (JTA) — In 1948, after the Holocaust, the right to asylum was recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to ensure that never again would anyone be trapped in their country of persecution.

It was the 1980s. I was a teenager, and the spread of a different contagion threatened to overturn our way of life: genital herpes.