Groundswell: Rachel Binstock on Spiritual Adaptation
Q&A with Rachel Binstock, organizer with Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action, about spiritual adaptation to climate crisis.
Groundswell: Hannah Fine on Community Resilience
To properly bless the food you’re eating, you have to know how it was grown—whether it came from a tree or the land or a vine. And that’s really powerful to me because increasingly we’re more disconnected from our food.
Groundswell: Kristy Drutman on Content Creation
With more than 56 thousand followers on Instagram alone, and a blog and podcast to boot, Kristy Drutman (@browngirl_green) interviews leaders in environmental causes, advocates...
Introducing Groundswell
Groundswell is a solutions-based series of Q&As highlighting 10 grassroots Jewish changemakers confronting the climate crisis, coinciding with COP26 in Glasgow.
Jo Kent Katz on the Continuing Impact of Ancestral Trauma
It takes a lot for me to trust that someone knows about, or cares about, the survival of my people. And I need to hear it, and I need to hear it several times, in order to quell the fear that I have inside of me that says that they don’t care, they don’t have our backs, and that we could all just be annihilated and that would be better according to whoever they are.
What Just Happened in Israel?
Here is a short introductory guide to what is unfolding, with the acknowledgment that in a situation as fraught and complex as this one, any explainer will necessarily be incomplete.
The Belly of the Beast with Ilene Prusher
Ilene Prusher is an award-winning journalist and novelist who covered Israel from the ground for 15 years for The Christian Science Monitor, Time, Haaretz, Moment...
Talk of the Table | Michael Twitty’s Kosher Soul Food
Chef Michael Twitty—a writer, culinary historian, cook and Hebrew school teacher—is an African American Jew (he converted at age 22) who uses his culinary prowess to explore the threads of his identity. In 2013, he became a well-known presence in culinary circles when he wrote an open letter to celebrity chef Paula Deen, which quickly went viral
The Promise of Cancer Immunotherapy
In 2010, Rob Densen’s wife was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. The doctors gave her 36 weeks to live, but she lived for 40 months. “She had a genetic mutation for which there was a targeted therapy,” says Densen. “We got that time because 10 or 15 year
Noah Rothman on Charlottesville and America’s Crisis of Identitarianism
In the wake of Charlottesville and the moral equivalency debate spawned by President Donald Trump’s comments, Noah Rothman has argued that, while it’s incumbent upon the right to get its house in order and expel white supremacists from its coalition, the left would do well to examine violent tendencies within its own ranks.
Visual Moment | A Forgotten Ottoman Way Station
The Ottomans ruled what is now Israel for 400 years, and during that time they made some iconic contributions to the man-made landscape. Sultan Suleiman I (a.k.a. Suleiman the Magnificent) completed the current walls of Jerusalem’s Old City in 1541. The Jaffa Clocktower, finished in 1903, was built to celebrate the silver jubilee of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. Over time, innumerable Ottoman buildings have been lost, replaced by those of British or Israeli design, just as they in turn had replaced those of the Crusaders, Mamluks, Byzantines, Romans, Hasmoneans, Greeks, ancient Israelites, Babylonians, Assyrians and Philistines.
The Jazz Kibbutz: A Brief History of Israel’s Jazz Scene
Israel’s jazz scene has been around since British mandate times, but really came into its own in the 90s. Thanks to trailblazers like Avishai Cohen, Omer Avital, and Avi Lebovich, Israel’s jazz music is now celebrated internationally for its quality as well as its diversity – Israeli jazz is nearly as big a jumble of cultures as Israel itself. “It’s very ‘exotic’ to the American or European ear,” says Barak Weiss, “but it’s still accessible because it’s based on American music.”