13 Nov
Arts & Culture, Culture, Latest, Misc, Religion

The Forward 50: 2008 Jews of the Year

By Jeremy Gillick The Forward has published its annual list of America’s 50 most important Jews: the Forward 50. Winners include Rahm Emanuel, Obama's newly appointed Chief of Staff, about whom you can read here. There's also Morris Allen, a Conservative Rabbi from Minnesota who helped re-invent kashrut as a moral rather than merely legal imperative, just as Agriprocessors, America's largest kosher meat producer, sunk deeper and deeper into sin, exploitation and eventually, bankruptcy. Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder of the new, liberal Jewish, Israel lobby group J-Street, is at the top of the list too. Although this choice is perhaps more a reflection of the Forward's editorial stance than of Ben-Ami's success, the creation of a viable alternative to AIPAC is, at the very least, a major symbolic accomplishment. And it could become much more than that. Here's what Moment...

Continue reading

12 Sep
Latest

Rabbis For McCain, Sort Of

Yesterday we wrote about Rabbis for Obama. Today, according to a Forward article, we should focus on Rabbis for McCain. Well, sort of. Says the Forward: A group of leading ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel is preparing to release a statement that urges the country’s American expatriates to exercise their voting rights in November by casting absentee ballots... Kalish said that the campaign, the first of its kind, is a nonpartisan effort to maximize the voting rate among American Israelis in order to strengthen the Jewish community’s bargaining power in Washington. The hope, he said, is that a high turnout will encourage the winning candidate — and other decision makers — to pay attention to the Jewish community’s priorities when formulating policy. So the first obvious difference between this movement and the one for Obama is that these...

Continue reading