RJ Blog

On May 2, Rhode Island’s governor signed a marriage equality bill, making it the tenth state to take this important step.   Shortly afterwards, Delaware and Minnesota also passed marriage bills, making this a remarkable spring of advancement towards equality. I composed the following reflection after the last critical step in the long process of advocacy and legislative debate, the hearing held by the Rhode Island Senate Judiciary Committee in March. The prescribed biblical reading for the beginning of Passover includes Exodus 12:42…in describing the end of the 430 years of oppression, the text describes that final night as a “leil [...]

by Eugenie Rosenthal Somaly Mam was just 14 years old when a man claiming to be her grandfather took her from her village and sold her into slavery in a Cambodian brothel. After years, she escaped and has since secured freedom for tens of thousands of other young girls enslaved Southeast Asia’s brothels. She has been called the “modern Harriet Tubman.” Might she be considered in some ways, a modern Moses? More people live in slavery today than at any other time in human history, 27 million according to the United Nations. This is more than the populations of New [...]

by Barbara Lerman-Golomb In 1999, I was invited to a small informal gathering of moms in Princeton, New Jersey to meet with a fellow NJ mother, Donna Dees-Thomases. A week after a shooting rampage at the North Valley JCC in Granada Hills, CA, Donna, a publicist with strong political ties, who dropped her own daughters off at a JCC each morning, was motivated to apply for a permit for a march on Washington to protest for sensible and meaningful gun legislation. She was calling it, the Million Mom March. The California shooter was a white supremacist who walked into the lobby of the JCC and [...]

by Rabbi Susan Talve Earlier this month, I joined many in the Jewish community in St. Louis and across the country in a Food Stamp Challenge. The Challenge was sponsored by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Mazon and the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements to raise awareness for the Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and to keep the program from falling prey to severe budget cuts. We limited all the food we ate to $31.50 per person, per week — the average food stamp allotment — to call attention to the challenges faced each meal, each day, by 46 [...]

by Rabbi Robert Nosanchuk In the recent election cycle, it was common for us to hear from those advocating their position on reproductive rights in national, state and local law. Some advocated that Roe vs. Wade should be struck down by the Supreme Court. Others suggested persuasively that a court’s definition of life is not nearly as important as what each of us learns from searching our own conscience. Ideally, as we in Reform Jewish congregational life approach this month’s 40th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, this would be a time for each of us to step back from the stigma [...]

I’ll never forget Sarah. Sarah was a young woman who sought me out for guidance and support during a very troubling time. She had had sexual intercourse for the first time. Not only was she devastated that afterward the guy revealed that he didn’t really like her as much as she liked him, but also she was nervous about being pregnant. They had had unprotected sex. As her rabbi, I held Sarah’s hand as she waited for the at-home pregnancy test to reveal its results. (Thankfully, it was negative.) As her rabbi, I counseled her about opening up to her [...]

by Steven Beck I have been on dozens of Freedom Rides in the year I have been working at IRAC. Recently, while taking a journalist on just such a ride, I realized I might have been on a few too many. I am starting to be recognized by Haredi men who ride the line regularly. Usually we do not get a chance to engage the ultra-Orthodox men in more than a few simple sentences explaining that we all have a right to sit wherever we want, but this recent ride went differently. I am a former Peace Corps volunteer who [...]

by Michael Sarna Coming off of a semester that I was less then satisfied with this past spring, I knew that I wanted to try to apply myself over my summer break as opposed to merely do some run-of-the-mill activity. Having burned out of the Camp Counselor game, I knew that I wanted to take on a new type of challenge; one that would not only be interesting to me, but would also help to define my career aspirations and really push me in the right direction for what I want to do with the remainder of my college experience. [...]

by Wes Peskin S’mores, Capitol Hill, and Judaism: Can you figure out what they all have in common? For me, they are some of the most important aspects of my experience as a participant in the Religious Action Center’s Machon Kaplan work/study internship program for college students. Add to that list: introducing me to some of my closest friends, showing me a career path I love (yet had no idea existed at the time), and being my first “real world” experience, just to name a few of the things Machon Kaplan did for me. I arrived at the RAC on [...]

There is a growing fervor among conservative legislators and citizens that they were wronged by the vote of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on the constitutionality of Obama’s health care legislation. There are recent reports that Justice Roberts initially held an opposing opinion before changing his vote and upholding the individual mandate, which is the central tenet of the new health care law. I find the vitriol directed at Justice Roberts to be both misguided and undermining to the court’s standing in our political process.

Below are reflections on the recently failed votes on divestment from Israel at the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly by Fred Guttman, a rabbi at Temple Emanuel in Greensboro, NC and a member of the Union for Reform Judaism’s Commission on Social Action. All views expressed are his own. For more information on the PC(USA) General Assembly, see Rabbi Saperstein’s comments here. Thursday night for the second time in two years, I watched the live stream from the Biennial PCUSA General Assembly. The Middle East Committee presented a recommendation that the PCUSA divest its pension funds from Motorola, Caterpillar and Hewlett Packard. [...]

by Haley Orlofsky It had been a normal day at the Clean Water Network — interns were glued to policy research on their computers, running errands in the Senate office buildings and listening in on conference calls, all while working on the Network’s Twitter campaign to #kickcoalash from the Transportation Bill. Everything was going as planned until something went terribly wrong: The Internet crashed! The other interns and I remained calm at first; however, after countless minutes of trying to repair the situation, we ended up in a tangled mess of wires, forced to come to terms with the alarming [...]

by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz Here’s my family’s July 4th ritual: In the morning, we put out the American flag and sing Phil Ochs’ song “Power and Glory”: Come on and take a walk with me thru this green and growing land Walk thru the meadows and the mountains and the sand …

by Rabbi Debra Hachen She only says a few words, but our friends’ granddaughter Stella has one expression down cold: “Uh-oh.” She says it when she drops a toy on the floor or sees a dog trying to sneak food off the table. She feels the stirrings of guilt – her sense of right and wrong forming in her agile brain. The day we will expect her to be fully responsible for all her actions and their consequences seems far off. After all, she is only a child. On June 25, the Supreme Court ruled that the line between child [...]