Jewish groups have stepped up efforts to combat anti-Muslim bigotry, with several national initiatives announced this week and supporting statements coming in from a range of Jewish voices.
In Washington, officials from several Jewish organizations took part Tuesday in an emergency summit of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders that denounced anti-Muslim bigotry and called for a united effort by believers of all faiths to reach out to Muslim Americans.
Also Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League announced the creation of an Interfaith Coalition on Mosques, which will monitor and respond to instances of anti-Muslim bias surrounding attempts to build new mosques in the United States. (A preview of the announcement ran in The Jewish Standard.)
Robert M., 58, worked for a news organization in the San Francisco Bay area until September 2008, when he lost his job in layoffs that eliminated 15 percent of the company’s workforce nationwide.
Robert had eight months worth of savings. They ran out in six months.
After 14 months of unemployment, in December 2009 Robert turned to San Francisco’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services for help with rent, utilities, and, hardest of all, food.
SAN FRANCISCO – When Israel’s new Masorti prayer book hit No. 4 on the country’s best-seller list for non-fiction last January, no one was more surprised than members of the country’s still-tiny Conservative movement.
The prayer book, “Va’ani Tfillati: An Israeli Siddur,” enjoyed an aggressive ad campaign from co-publisher Yediot Achronot, which also puts out Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper.
“The ads said, basically, if your grandfather is from Lithuania and your grandmother is from Morocco, this is the siddur for you,” said Miriam Hershlag, a member of Havurat Tel Aviv, a lay-led Conservative congregation in Tel Aviv that purchased the new siddur last March after its publication in December.
This Rosh HaShanah, worshippers in Conservative congregations across North America will find themselves using a new machzor.
More than 150,000 copies of the High Holidays prayer book, Mahzor Lev Shalem, have been pre-sold, representing orders from nearly 130 of some 650 affiliated congregations.
The strong interest might stem from “dissatisfaction with all previous machzors,” said Rabbi Stuart Kelman of Berkeley, Calif., a member of the committee that produced the prayer book.
Lev Shalem in one sense is a response to two oft-heard criticisms of the Conservative movement: that it is too elitist and too intellectual.
WADI FUKIN, west bank – Mohammed Mansara, a 70-year-old farmer who goes by the name Abu Mazen, indicates with a sweep of his arm the fruit trees and vegetables he grows on his small plot of land in this Palestinian village in the west bank, population 1,200.
Then he points to a small green hill on the western side of the village topped by a tidy cluster of red-roofed homes. That is Tzur Hadassah, an Israeli community of about 5,000 Jewish residents.
“Tzur Hadassah has such nice people,” he says in Hebrew. “They are great neighbors.”
SAN FRANCISCO – The University of California Board of Regents addressed the recent spate of hate, violence, and racist vandalism at its campuses by announcing a series of measures designed to monitor and prevent such incidents in the university system.
Among the incidents that provoked a March 24 three-hour meeting devoted to the violence was the heckling of Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren during a speech at UC Irvine several weeks ago. At UC Davis, a swastika was carved into a freshman student’s dorm door; five more were scrawled on walls and bulletin boards. At UC San Diego, a noose was found hanging in the university library and a Ku Klux Klan-style hood was draped on a statue.
Alex Varum was 8 years old when he left Russia. Now 35 and a real estate developer in Silicon Valley, Varum grew up in California, speaks English like a native — much better than Russian — and feels American in every way.
So why would he spend an entire weekend exploring Jewish identity with a group of other young Jews from the former Soviet Union, many of whose personal ties to the Old Country are as negligible as his own?
“I feel somehow that I don’t belong to the American Jewish community,” he says. “I don’t feel Russian — I’m American. But I don’t identify as an American Jew.”
BERKELEY, Calif. – Judaism is a harsh, exacting faith condemning rebellious children to death by stoning. Islam exhorts Muslims to kill non-believers.
Neither statement, according to many Jewish and Muslim scholars, is true. But they are among the most persistent charges laid at the feet of Judaism and Islam by those who are unfamiliar with the basic holy texts of the other’s faith.
Hampered by such ignorance, how can Jews and Muslims engage in real interfaith dialogue?
A new graduate-level course in Berkeley, billed as the first of its kind, aims to rectify this failing, at least for the 40 or so students enrolled.
“Madrasa/Midrasha: Muslim-Jewish Text Study,” a nine-week course spearheaded by the Progressive Jewish Alliance and run by the Center for Jewish Studies and the Center for Islamic Studies of the Graduate Theological Union, introduces students of both faiths to the methodologies and foundational content of the Koran, Torah and Talmud.
Karyn Moskowitz runs the Fresh Stop Project, a food co-op program at a historic black Baptist church in West Louisville, Ky., a low-income, largely African American neighborhood.
One day she and some women at the church were talking about how they cooked fresh greens. One woman said she used bacon fat, like her friends. Moskowitz said she used olive oil, thinking she’d use the conversation as a teaching moment about the health benefits of avoiding saturated fats.
The woman responded: “Olive oil? Where do you get that?”
Moskowitz’s project brought fresh, organic fruits, and vegetables to this community at an affordable price, but there were no real supermarkets in the neighborhood, no place for the residents to purchase other healthful foods. That’s something young Jewish food activists often forget, Moskowitz says.
“We think nothing of driving to Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. They do not have that option.”
Cong. Ner Tamid in Henderson, Nev., webcasts its bar and bat mitzvah services for family and friends who cannot attend.
The preschool director at Cong. Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Va., tweets from the classroom several times a day, so parents can get a sense of what their children are learning.
Within this past year, synagogues, religious schools, and other Jewish groups have been signing on to Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and other social media eager to learn how new technology can strengthen their organizations and improve their outreach.
