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June 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...
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June 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,...
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The 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...
View ArticleSupporting the Black Lives Matter Platform
ITS SLANDER OF ISRAEL NOTWITHSTANDING An editorial from the Autumn 2016 issue of Jewish Currents WHEN THE BLACK Lives Matter movement (#BLM) emerged two years ago in angry protest over police racism in...
View ArticleBob Dylan and the Significance of Not Signifying Anything
by Mitchell Abidor I HAVE TO ADMIT I’m thoroughly enjoying the discomfiture of the Nobel Committee over Bob Dylan’s refusal to acknowledge his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. That the...
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In Memoriam: Jack Greenberg, Gene Wilder
by Bennett Muraskin JACK GREENBERG (December 22, 1924—October 12, 2016; shown above with Constance Baker Motley and Thurgood Marshall) was hired at 24 in 1949 by Thurgood Marshall, director of the...
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Eight Ideas for Khanike Gelt
by Lawrence Bush KHANIKE GELT (gifts of money) has roots in days of Jewish poverty, when children rarely had a penny of their own. In contemporary times of Jewish prosperity, perhaps it is the whole...
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...
View ArticleOpEdge: Trump’s Lies about John Lewis
by Marc Jampole JOHN LEWIS said what a lot of us have been thinking: that Trump is not a legitimate president because of voter suppression laws in a handful of states that broke to Trump by micro-thin...
View ArticleCurt Flood and Marvin Miller
Three-time All-Star baseball player Curt Flood (a .293 lifetime hitter in fifteen seasons), who reached out to Marvin Miller to sue Major League Baseball in 1969 in defiance of the “reserve clause” — a...
View ArticleIs Racism Actually in Decline?
by Dusty Sklar DESPITE THE RISE in white supremacist activity and the increased visibility of police violence against people of color, my impression is that non-whites are being accepted more and more...
View ArticleIgal Roodenko and the Freedom Rides
Igal Roodenko (1917-1991), a pacifist and a gay Jewish activist (center in photo above, with suitcase), was among sixteen men, eight black and eight white, who began a “Journey of Reconciliation” on...
View ArticleRabbi Arthur Hertzberg
Arthur Hertzberg, a champion of Jewish liberalism and independent thought who led the American Jewish Congress, stoked Jewish support for the civil rights movement, called for Palestinian statehood...
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If It’s Not Genocide, What Word Should We Use?
A DISSENT FROM OUR EDITORIAL ON THE BLACK LIVES MATTER PLATFORM by Dorothy Zellner From the Summer 2017 issue of Jewish Currents I TAKE ISSUE with the Jewish Currents editorial, “Supporting the Black...
View ArticleThe Short Season, Part 2
HUSTLING FULL-TIME IN THE CATSKILLS by Elliot Podwill To read Part 1, click here. THE SOCIAL DARWINIAN universe we inhabited filtered down to adolescent social mores. A friend in high school was on...
View ArticleOpposing Segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas
Little Rock, Arkansas began to integrate its public schools on this date in 1959 while segregationists rallied at the State Capitol and then marched to Central High School, where police arrested...
View Article“Marshall”— Civil Rights and Old-Fashioned Shul Jews
by Elliot B. Gertel Discussed in this essay: Marshall, a film directed by directed by Reginald Hudlin and written by Michael and Jacob Koskoff. THE WELL-WRITTEN and finely-acted movie Marshall may have...
View ArticleSix Million Ku Klux Klansmen
by Dusty Sklar Discussed in this essay: The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, by Linda Gordon. Liveright, 2017, 288 pages. THE KU KLUX...
View ArticleAnti-Occupation Activists Undeterred By Israel’s Blacklist
Photo courtesy of Solidarity of Nations – Achvat Amim by Emily C. Bell ISRAEL HAS ABRUPTLY closed the door on members of twenty organizations that support the boycott, divestment and sanctions...
View ArticleIn Memoriam: The Woman Who Popularized “Ms.”
by Bennett Muraskin ALTHOUGH Ms. magazine is most identified with Gloria Steinem, the woman who most popularized the term “Ms.” was Sheila Michaels (1939-2017). The word enabled women to be...
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