More on “Selma” and Progressive Jews
by Joel Shatzky I RECENTLY SAW the film Selma and read the very comprehensive and moving response to it at the Jewish Currents website by Al Vorspan concerning the absence in the movie of Rabbi Abraham...
View ArticleOpEdge: On the Bridge in Selma
by Marc Jampole IT’S EASY TO FORGET that there were three Selma marches in 1965. March 7th commemorates the bloody first march, in which state troopers and a county posse attacked six hundred unarmed...
View ArticleMarch 27: Anthony Lewis
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist Anthony Lewis was born in New York on this date in 1927. He was especially known as an expert on the law, and covered both the U.S. Justice Department...
View ArticleMarching with the King: Rabbi Israel S. Dresner on his days with Martin...
Rabbi Israel S. Dresner, once dubbed the “most arrested rabbi in America,” will speak about his close relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and the explosive early days of the civil rights...
View ArticleHuh? Jews Can’t Argue on Campus?
Hillel International Bans Free Speech by Mark Levy SOME THINGS make me quite angry and tend to increase my activism rather than push me away. Take, for example, speaker bans. Hillel chapters on college...
View ArticleJuly 20: Roberta Achtenberg, the First Openly Gay Federal Appointee
Roberta Achtenberg, commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the first openly gay federal appointee approved by the U.S. Senate (in January 2011), was born on this date in 1950....
View ArticleJuly 28: Fighting the Good Fight in California
Attorney William K. Coblentz, who defended the California Board of Regents from Governor Ronald Reagan’s red-baiting, represented Patty Hearst after her kidnapping-recruitment by the Symbionese...
View ArticleA Visual History of the American Jewish Left, Part 3
Post-War to Present by the Editorial Board Adapted from the Spring and Summer, 2015 issues of Jewish Currents Read other installments in this series here. THE RAPID TAKEOVER of Central and Eastern...
View ArticleO My America: Eight Themes for Khanike Gelt
by Lawrence Bush KHANIKE GELT — SMALL GIFTS OF MONEY — HAS ROOTS IN DAYS OF JEWISH POVERTY when children rarely had a penny of their own. It was also a means of paying kheyder teachers and helping them...
View ArticleDecember 15: The American Jewish Congress
The American Jewish Congress held its first meeting on this date in 1918, which was also the anniversary of the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, a document that AJCongress in its hey-day...
View ArticleMartin Luther King Is My Rabbi
by Rabbi Jonathan Kligler from the online newsletter and Torah commentary of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation Va’yavo Moshe v’Aharon el Par’oh va’yomru eilav, “Ko amar YHVH, Elohei ha’Ivrim: ad matai...
View ArticleFebruary 6: Giant Food’s First Supermarket
Nehemiah Cohen and Samuel Lehrman opened the first Giant supermarket in Washington, DC on this date in 1936. “At a time when most grocery shopping was done at small stores that specialized in meat,...
View ArticleFebruary 7: Non-Violent Communication
Marshall Rosenberg, a psychologist who was the creator of Non-Violent Communication (NVC), a communication process that helps to resolve conflicts without violence, died at 83 on this date in 2015....
View ArticleO My America: My Democratic Ass
by Lawrence Bush from the Spring 2016 issue of Jewish Currents
View ArticleApril 10: David Halberstam
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and popular historian David Halberstam was born in New York on this date in 1934. After graduating from Harvard, where he was managing editor of the Crimson, he began...
View ArticleMay 18: The Liberal Republican
Jacob Javits, the last staunchly liberal Republican senator — he became a Republican in reaction to the corrupt Democratic politics of Tammany Hall — was born to pushcart peddlers on the Lower East...
View ArticleJune 27: Helen Keller and the Jews
Helen Keller, the deaf and blind gentile woman who became an internationally admired figure after she gained language through her teacher, Anne Sullivan, was born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, on this...
View ArticleJune 29: Stokely Carmichael and the Jews
Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, a dynamic leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who evolved into a pan-Africanist revolutionary with a penchant for attacking Zionism,...
View ArticleThe Last Resort: A Century of Demagogues
by Al Vorspan THE CLICHE that truth is stranger than fiction is sometimes really right. About thirty years ago, my brother-in-law Sid was en route from New York City to Hillsdale, New York to visit...
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December 15: The American Jewish Congress
The American Jewish Congress held its first meeting on this date in 1918, which was also the anniversary of the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, a document that AJCongress in its hey-day...
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