Jews in the White House? Who knew!
When rioters inspired by President Donald Trump broke through police lines and invaded the U.S. Capitol, few members of Congress felt the sense of violation more acutely than Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
Hanukkah’s great culinary divide runs right across my brother Paul Freedman’s dining room table in suburban Pelham, New York.
Eileen Filler-Corn, Virginia’s first female—and first Jewish—Speaker of the House of Delegates, is playing a key role in dismantling the state’s Confederate legacy, statue by statute.
Rabbi Sandra Lawson serves as Jewish educator and associate chaplain for Jewish life at Elon University near Burlington, North Carolina. Since September, Lawson has been a participant in our Jewish Political Voices Project, where Moment is exploring the views of American Jewish voters in the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election. Moment contributor Dan Freedman spoke with Lawson about the recent events surrounding the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed.
Stanley, who is a participant in Moment’s Jewish Political Voices Project, had planned on attending the 50th-anniversary observances on the Kent State campus. All her friends would be there; she booked a hotel reservation a year in advance. But Covid-19 ended all that. A nation on the edge 50 years ago is facing upheaval of a different order.
Meetings and classrooms have been disrupted by blasts from pornographic films and, in one case, a shouter interrupted a Massachusetts school class meeting with profanities, and then disclosed the teacher’s home address.
With an uptick of anti-Semitism worldwide coinciding with the Coronavirus pandemic, it is all too easy to wonder if a comparable attack on Jews is brewing. And stories of insults of Asian-Americans on public streets are an unsettling reminder of what a hateful response to a public health crisis might yield. Jews, who in recent decades have mostly stood against bigotry, may again have to reacquaint themselves with this tragic chapter in their history.
When the couple visits friends and family, liberal Democrat Amy Weiss has a simple admonition for her conservative Republican husband, Lou: “Just don’t be yourself.”
