Judaism

Churches and state work together to deter threats against houses of worship

January 4, 2023

Sunday morning inside Faith Christian Church in Dorchester, and Pastor Brenda White is preaching to her flock.

To help everyone focus on matters of faith, her church has partnered with the state to boost its security -- one of about 300 non-profit and faith based organizations across that state that have tapped into $13.9 million in state and federal grants over the last five years.

"Are you worried about violence coming into this church?" 5 Investigates' Mike Beaudet asked.

Source:...

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Why some Hasidic Children Can't Leave Failing Schools

December 12, 2022

Beatrice Weber wakes up most mornings afraid that her son’s Hasidic Jewish school is setting him up to fail.

Her 10-year-old, Aaron, brims with curiosity, and has told his mother that he wants to work for NASA. But his school, like other Hasidic boys’ schools in New York, teaches only cursory English and math and little science or social studies. It focuses instead on imparting the values of the fervently religious Hasidic community, which speaks Yiddish rather than English and places the study of Jewish law and prayer above all else. Recently, Ms. Weber said, Aaron’s teacher...

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The Hanukkah merch market has exploded. But are Jews feeling more represented?

December 13, 2022

It was early November when Nicholas Wymer-Santiago walked into his local Target in Austin, Texas, and realized it was beginning to feel a lot like Hanukkah.

Instead of an endcap with a limited array of Hanukkah basics, as he had seen in past years, there stretched out a whole aisle of holiday products: pillows; dreidel-shaped pet toys; window decals; menorahs in the shape of lions, corgis and whales; and so much more. Even the $5-and-under impulse-buys section filled with seasonal products had a supply of Hanukkah goods, including a Star of David-shaped bowl and a set of...

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This Advent, churches urged to assess worship for inadvertent antisemitism

December 14, 2022

This December, Christian congregations will belt “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and priests will wax poetic about Old Testament prophecies. As they do so, a group of Jewish, Christian and Muslim educators is calling on them to examine where antisemitic ideas might be lurking undetected. 

On Wednesday (Dec. 14), the Council of Centers on Jewish-Christian Relations — a group of roughly ...

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Jewish Americans confront antisemitism with resolve, worry

December 8, 2022

Jewish Americans are closely following the recent upsurge in antisemitic rhetoric and actions with a mix of anxiety and resolve — along with a yearning that a broader swath of Americans, including leaders across the political spectrum, speak out against anti-Jewish hatred.

New Yorker Rizy Horowitz, who runs a program in Brooklyn providing meals and activities for Holocaust survivors, says the widespread vitriol prompts her to ask: “When...

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Why I stay: LGBTQ people of faith find ways to belong where doctrine rejects them

December 6, 2022

When queer students at Yeshiva University sued the school for discrimination in spring 2021, critics were quick to question why LGBTQ students would opt for an Orthodox Jewish university in the first place.

But for many LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, as with believers of other faiths, their religious identities are as nonnegotiable as their queer identities.

“A lot of people ask, why would somebody who is queer stay Orthodox? It’s like...

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Keeping Greater Boston's Jewish Community Safe

December 8, 2022

American extremists pose a “persistent and lethal threat” to the LGBTQ, migrant and Jewish communities. That troubling advisory came last week from the Department of Homeland Security. 

With antisemitic acts and threats at an all-time high, NBC10 Boston checked in with the greater Boston Jewish community’s top security expert. Our cameras were invited in to see an active shooter training session with dozens of preschool teachers....

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Religious violence increases anxiety among Muslims and Jews, even if they have never been personally targeted

December 5, 2022

Fear of hate crime looms especially large in the minds of Jews and Muslims, even if they have never been personally targeted, according to a new study from Rice University and West Virginia University.

"Fear of Religious Hate Crime Victimization and the Residual Effects of Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia" appears in a recent edition of Social Forces.

Using data from the 2019 edition of the nationally representative Experiences with Religious Discrimination Study survey, the authors found that among religious groups, Jews and Muslims were most likely to...

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Antisemitic celebrities stoke fears of normalizing hate

December 3, 2022

A surge of anti-Jewish vitriol, spread by a world-famous rapper, an NBA star and other prominent people, is stoking fears that public figures are normalizing hate and ramping up the risk of violence in a country already experiencing a sharp increase in antisemitism.

Leaders of the Jewish community in the U.S. and extremism experts have been alarmed to see celebrities with massive followings spew antisemitic tropes in a way that has been taboo for decades....

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Musk says Twitter has suspended rapper Ye over swastika post

December 2, 2022

Twitter has suspended rapper Ye after he tweeted a picture of a swastika merged with the Star of David.

It is the second time this year that Ye has been suspended from the platform over antisemitic posts.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk confirmed the suspension by replying to Ye’s post of an unflattering photo of Musk. Ye called it his “final tweet.”

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Asian faiths try to save swastika symbol corrupted by Hitler

November 27, 2022

Sheetal Deo was shocked when she got a letter from her Queens apartment building’s co-op board calling her Diwali decoration “offensive” and demanding she take it down.

“My decoration said ‘Happy Diwali’ and had a swastika on it,” said Deo, a physician, who was celebrating the Hindu festival of lights.

The equilateral cross with its legs bent at right angles is a millennia-old sacred symbol in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism that represents peace and good fortune, and was also used widely by Indigenous people worldwide in a similar vein.

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Veterans, Muslim and Jewish groups file support for Sikh recruits suing Marine Corps

November 16, 2022

Muslim, Jewish and interfaith groups, as well as U.S. veterans, are rallying behind three prospective Sikh recruits who earlier this year sued the United States Marine Corps in their push to attend training while maintaining their turbans and beards.

Sikhs who serve in the Marine Corps can keep their beards and unshorn hair — which are articles of their faith — under a turban while on duty, according to the service’s grooming regulations, but are forbidden from doing so during combat deployment and in the course of recruit trainings.

Jaskirat Singh, Aekash Singh and...

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Poll: US Jews overwhelmingly backed Democrats in midterms

November 10, 2022

 For many American Jews, the midterm election results brought a collective sigh of relief when Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, lost his race, defeated by Josh Shapiro, the state’s attorney general and a fellow Jew.

The U.S. Jewish community has strained in the past few months under a barrage of antisemitic attacks from multiple directions: the rap artist Ye, Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving and even former President Donald Trump.

Mastriano seemed most frightening of all: A pro-Trump Christian nationalist (though he dismissed...

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As a rabbi, he worked on Jewish-Catholic relations. Now the pope is knighting him.

November 1, 2022

Rabbi A. James Rudin, the longtime interreligious affairs director for the American Jewish Committee, will be conferred the prestigious Papal Knight of St. Gregory for his work on Catholic-Jewish relations, one of the few non-Catholics to receive the honor.

Only eight other Jews have been knighted by the order, established in 1831, that recognizes personal service or unusual labor in support of the Catholic Church. Among them are three other rabbis, David Rosen and the late Mordecai Waxman and Leon Klenicki.

A Reform rabbi and also a writer who has contributed...

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