Новости за 02.11.2018

If nothing else, the Pittsburgh massacre should underline for all American Jews that our ongoing struggle against hate is not a narrow sectarian interest or a partisan political tool. It is a matter of life or death—for your neighbors, your synagogue, your family, your children, your parents and grandparents, for our community.

Josh Kalla, a graduate student living in Berkeley, CA and a Pittsburgh native, got a call early Saturday morning from his father, and then his sister, telling him there had been a shooting in their family’s synagogue. Later that night, he stopped by a vigil being held near his West Coast apartment. Though he was moved by the support and the solidarity of the Berkeley community, he didn’t stay long.

Bibliotherapy is good medicine. That’s why the Association of Jewish Libraries, in response to the tragedy in Pittsburgh and other distressing events across the country, has committed to publishing a series of “Love Your Neighbor”-themed booklists, to help educate non-Jewish kids about Jews and Judaism.

As I’ve been paying shiva calls to the families of the dead, one thing I’ve noticed is that people are hesitant to touch the food. Otherwise, In the midst of an unprecedented trauma—the aftermath of the worst mass-murder of Jews in American history—shiva feels poignantly and defiantly normal, a ritual whose contours don’t really change based on how or why or when an individual dies. In Pittsburgh, as anywhere else, friends and families gather and pray and begin to inch towards whatever consolation might lie in the months or years ahead. Читать дальше...

When there are tragedies in the world that challenge and push against the limits of language, Jews traditionally say Psalms. Psalms, or Tehillim, provide a liturgy that has been used for thousands of years to offer us words when we have none.

During the first two decades of the 20th century, Canada’s total Jewish population increased from 16,401 in 1901 to 125,197 in 1921, which represented 1.42 percent of the country’s total population. Much of this increase owed to the arrival of thousands of Russian and Eastern European immigrants, who were not especially welcomed with open arms.

Contemporary American comedy is, with very few exceptions, a jittery mess. If you want to understand why, pick any five comics who worked between, say, 1930 and 1990, and listen to their acts. Styles, themes, and temperaments will vary, but one thing does not: They are telling you the truth.

The small but vibrant neighborhood of Squirrel Hill on the East Side of Pittsburgh welcomed Shabbat on Oct. 27 just like they would any other Saturday. As Jews across the United States entered their places of worship that same morning, a radicalized right-wing anti-Semite hellbent on committing a hate crime against Jews put his demented plan into motion.

Studies of genocide show that those who kill their neighbors must dehumanize them before such attacks are widely accepted. In America, white Americans had been dehumanizing blacks and unleashing violence on black bodies for 300 years before the rise of the re-formed Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, when the organized targeting of Jews by hate movements began. The small population of Jews who lived in America throughout the 17th, 18th, and most of the 19th centuries did so in an environment of relative tolerance... Читать дальше...