RSS
Why This Year’s Shavuot Is One of the Most Important Ever
Shavuot. Ruth in Boaz’s Field by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, oil on canvas, 1828; National Gallery, London. Photo: Wikipedia.
Beginning Tuesday evening, June 11, Jews all over the world celebrate Shavuot and commemorate the day they received the Torah and its commandments at Sinai.
The Talmudic Sages, apparently familiar with Alan King’s classic summary of the Jewish holiday — they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat — recognized that some may not consider the reams of obligations placed on the Jewish people as cause for celebration. The Sages were especially insistent that Jews demonstrate otherwise and eat really well on this day.
Particularly now, this celebration is essential for two reasons. First, this year has headlined the experience of Jewish suffering, reviving the harsh reality that for millennia, the Jewish people have been despised, harassed, and persecuted. Still, rather than drive Jews away, the disorienting isolation that American Jews are experiencing has brought them closer together and awakened their desire for connection to Judaism and Jewish community. Jews are craving to celebrate their Jewishness, not just their survival.
Second, the Jewish people are a nation, a religion, and a family — but most significantly, they are a community of values. Their mission since Abraham has been to teach and to model both faith in God and loving kindness towards others. That story continues to this day, as despite the centuries of persecution, the Holocaust, and the constant existential threats that Israel has faced since its rebirth, the Jewish people refuse to turn bitterly inward and remain committed to being a source of blessing to the world.
Nevertheless, the twisted narrative promoted in academia, the media, progressive and far-right spaces, and international forums, has cast the Jewish people everywhere as genocidal, oppressive, and hateful, radically increasing the physical threats of antisemitic violence facing Jews everywhere. But — even more perniciously — this also makes Jews embarrassed of their Jewish identity. The celebration of Shavuot is an opportunity to proudly reaffirm the Jewish people’s core identity and mission as a community of values dedicated to faith and goodness.
The current nightmare began on October 7, Simchat Torah — a holiday when Jews everywhere gather in synagogues in joyous celebration of the completion of the annual cycle of Torah reading. Carrying their children on their shoulders and Torah scrolls in their arms, participants sing and dance in a joyous celebration of family and faith, and — most of all — the values that define them as a community.
The words — the value statements — sung repeatedly on that day express deep appreciation for the blessings of true Jewish identity, and for the good fortune to continue the mission of Abraham and the Jewish people to do good, to be good, to study, to live by God’s word, and to bring light to the world. They sing, they dance, they conclude the reading of the Torah, and then they immediately begin studying it again, demonstrating their true character as the People of the Book.
Eight months ago, that day was shattered as darkness was brought upon the world by the Hamas terrorists and their supporters, who continue to seek to physically destroy the Jewish people. That darkness has since significantly intensified thanks to those defending and even celebrating the attacks, and has been further deepened by those who speak in the name of justice, humanitarianism, and civil rights while denying the morality of Jews and of the very existence of Israel. Antisemitism is alive and well.
But so are the Jewish people — committed as ever to their values, to their goodness, to their faith, to their purpose, to each other, and to the light that they will never stop working to bring to the world.
Happy Shavuot. Let’s eat.
Rabbi Moshe Hauer is the Executive Vice President at the Orthodox Union.
The post Why This Year’s Shavuot Is One of the Most Important Ever first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada
Vancouver police arrested and released one person at the home of Charlotte Kates, director of the terror group Samidoun, in a dramatic raid on Nov. 14. The raid was conducted […]
The post Vancouver police raid a home linked to the director of Samidoun—which is now a terrorist entity in Canada appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
RSS
Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims
Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Forum River Center in Rome, Georgia, US, March 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Alyssa Pointer
President-elect Donald Trump won an overwhelming majority of the votes in New York City (NYC) precincts that were at least a quarter Jewish, according to a data analysis by the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), a prominent Washington DC-based political group.
RJC presented data on Friday affirming the notion that Trump won a higher proportion of the NYC Jewish vote than in previous elections, potentially signaling an ideological shift in the traditionally-liberal voting bloc. According to RJC data, Trump received the “overwhelming” majority of votes in precincts with a Jewish population of at least 25%.
Trump’s 2024 performance among Jews in NYC seems to mark a substantial improvement over the 2020 and 2016 elections, contests in which the president-elect struggled to make inroads among Jewish voters.
Voting data from the 2024 election also indicate that there was a significant shift among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania. President-elect Trump also enjoyed greater success in heavily-Jewish enclaves of deep-blue cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, according to data compiled by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and the Los Angeles Times, respectively.
Trump’s increased success among Jewish voters in the Big Apple comes amid simmering anger over surging antisemitism across the country.
In the year following the Hamas slaughter of roughly 1200 people throughout southern Israel, college campuses have become embroiled in an unrelenting onslaught of protests opposing the Jewish state. Moreover, many Jews have expressed dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, suggesting that the president has not been a firm ally of the Jewish state.
Over the past year, NYC has been ravaged with raucous, often-violent anti-Israel demonstrations and an unrelenting spate of antisemitic hate crimes.
Columbia University, one of the most prestigious higher education institutions in the world, became a poster-child for the anti-Israel campus movement, erecting encampments and holding protests calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Many NYC public schools came embroiled in scandal after teachers presented students with lesson plans that accused Israel of committing “apartheid” and “genocide” against the Palestinians.
Though most national Democrats continue to express support for Israel’s right to defend itself from Hamas terrorists, some figures in the party have, over the past year, adopted a more adversarial posture toward the Jewish state, often citing the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a key reason.
High-profile Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) have suggested that Israel has perpetrated a “genocide” against Palestinians in Hamas-ruled Gaza, where Israel has been waging a military campaign targeting terrorists since the Oct. 7 atrocities. Earlier this year, a group of dozens of Democratic lawmakers, including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), sent a letter to US President Joe Biden, urging him to “reconsider” approving offensive arms shipments to Israel.
Over the course of his campaign, Trump repeatedly touted his support for the Jewish state during his singular term in office. While courting Jewish voters, Trump has boasted about his administration’s work in fostering the Abraham Accords, promising to resume efforts to strengthen them once he retains office in January.
Trump also recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic region on Israel’s northern border previously controlled by Syria, and also moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognizing the city as the Jewish state’s capital.
The post Trump Won A Majority of Votes In Heavily-Jewish New York City Precincts, Election Data Claims first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge
Screenshot of masked men who attempted to rob Jewish man in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on Thursday. Photo: Screenshot
The Jewish community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York was the target of another attack on Thursday evening, as three men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the neighborhood.
Footage of the incident was shared on X/Twitter by Yaacov Behrman, liaison of Chabad Headquarters and founder of the Jewish Future Alliance (JFA) nonprofit. It shows the men, whose faces were concealed by hoods and ski masks, chasing the man into the street and through the neighborhood after attempting to accost him.
No arrests have been made.
“He doesn’t give in easily, and I don’t think they got anything,” Behrman tweeted. “The Jewish Future Alliance is deeply concerned not only about the increase in crime but also the fact that, once again, the perpetrators were wearing masks. We need to reinstate mask laws.”
The explosion of an antisemitic hate crime spree in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn has set the Orthodox Jewish community on edge in recent weeks.
Last Tuesday, two men beat a middle-aged Hasidic man after he refused to surrender his cell phone in compliance with what appears to have been an attempted robbery. According to multiple accounts, the assailants were two Black teenagers.
That incident was the third time in eight days that an Orthodox resident of Crown Heights was targeted for violence and humiliation. Before then, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily neighborhood, which is heavily Jewish, and less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face.
Most recently, a masked man was caught on video approaching a visibly Jewish father walking with his two sons and grabbing one of the children in broad daylight. He was unable to secure possession of the child, whose father fought back immediately and did not let go of his son. Police later identified the man as Stephan Stowe, 28 — a suspect gang member with an extensive criminal history which includes 33 prior arrests — and charged arrested him attempted kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child.
In each case, the suspect was allegedly a Black male, a pattern of conduct which continues to strain Black-Jewish relations across the Five Boroughs.
Black-on-Jewish crime is a social issue which has been studied before. In 2022, a report published by Americans Against Antisemitism (AAA) showed that Orthodox Jews were the minority group most victimized by hate crimes in New York City and that 69 percent of their assailants were African American. Seventy-seven percent of the incidents took place taking in predominantly Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Of all assaults that prompted criminal proceedings, just two resulted in convictions.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” AAA founder and former New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D) told The Algemeiner. “Shouldn’t there be a plan for how we’re going to deal with it? What’s the answer? Education? We’ve been educating everybody forever for God’s sake, and things are just getting worse.”
The problem has become acute in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face. Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.
According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Attempted Robbery of Jewish Man in Brooklyn Puts Orthodox Community on Edge first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login