Fresh Updates from RAC

School is out, the weather is hot and mosquitoes are buzzing! This can only mean one thing: Reform Jewish youth across North America are in the final countdown to the opening day of summer camp! As someone who grew up going to camp and then spent many college summers working at Jewish summer camps, each year at this time I get a bit reminiscent of that countdown, of days with friends that seem to last forever, and even of the mosquito bites!

That’s why, as the Program Coordinator at the Religious Action Center, I was excited to work with URJ camps to write and distribute a summer camp program to engage the youth of our Movement with Nothing But Nets. Nothing But Nets, a global, grassroots campaign, raises awareness and funding to fight malaria in Africa. Working on this partnership and writing these camp programs has surely given me a whole new prospective on the notorious mosquito bites I remember getting each summer at camp.

Read more…

This post is part of our Passover series, in which we think about the application of our age-old Passover story and traditions to the crucial issues we face today. For ways to infuse your seder with social justice, see our holiday guide.

Each year our seders culminate in the same jubilant cry, “Next year in Jerusalem!” Indeed the entire night can be seen as build-up to that promise, a journey toward freedom. But at the same time it is a profound retelling of oppression. We are commanded not only to remember that we were slaves in the land of Egypt, but to tell the story as if it happened to us personally: to say, “This is what the Lord did for me when he brought me out of the land of Egypt.”

Read more…

We all know the talking points by now. Our 24-hour news cycle has covered it constantly – Congress and the Administration are at an impasse over the so-called fiscal cliff. The expiring Bush tax cuts, reaching the debt ceiling, the looming threat of sequestration, finalizing the fiscal year 2013 appropriations bills – these are all pieces of the bigger challenge of our growing national debt. And it’s unclear how Congress will tackle any of these issues before the clock runs out.

What’s at risk in this showdown? Downgrading of the United States’ credit rating. Increased tax rates for all Americans.

Read more…

Rabbi David Saperstein spoke this morning alongside religious leaders from across the country urging Congress: “Don’t push the poor and most vulnerable off the ‘fiscal cliff.’” Joined by leaders of some of the nation’s most prominent Christian and Muslim organizations, Rabbi Saperstein stressed, “It is simply not acceptable that deficit reduction might increase the burden on those struggling the most in our communities. It is intolerable that debt reduction should come on the backs of the poorest among us, that it increase poverty or inequality.”

Read more…

This week we want to shed light on one of the most vulnerable populations in Israel. During the last five to ten years, thousands of asylum seekers from sub-Saharan Africa have crossed the Sinai Desert to reach Israel, on a perilous and heroic journey, like our own Exodus from Egypt.
Read more…

We’ve been hearing a lot recently about the so-called fiscal cliff: that moment, a few weeks off, when massive spending cuts kick in and major tax breaks expire. There has been a lot of frantic talk and heady discussion about how (and whether) America will dig in right now and face the hard facts about our federal deficit and debt.

Amidst all of this it can be easy to ignore the truly crushing debt afflicting countries all across the Global South, and to ignore America’s implications in this crisis and to forget to consider what we could do to help.

Read more…

Did you eat a meal on Monday? Did you go to the bathroom? Did you, like a friend of mine, accidentally super glue your fingers together? Though you may not have realized it you probably (hopefully) joined 200 million people in an important international holiday. Monday, October 15^th was the fourth annual Global Handwashing Day.

For most people in the United States and in the so-called “developed world,” washing your hands is something so simple, so routine, that one hardly even thinks about it. Yet this supremely quotidian behavior might just be the key to making significant strides in the global health crisis – especially for the health of children.

Read more…

Hey, I don’t know if you heard, but there’s a new iPhone. It’s supposed to be the thinnest smartphone in the world and it has a bigger screen! It even has 4G connectivity (though I’m not really sure what that means). And you can buy it from several leading phone companies for just $200-$400! Sounds great, right? Unfortunately that doesn’t cover the whole cost for the planet – and it’s definitely not the whole story…

Read more…