On the front page of the print edition of the Sept. 16 issue — our Rosh Hashana special edition — readers will notice something remarkable under the “flag,” the American Jewish World logotype. We have arrived at “Volume 100 • No. 1.”
The Jewish World, which dates to June 12, 1912 (the first issue of The [...]

On the morning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush was sitting with second-graders in Sarasota, Fla. They were reading The Pet Goat, when Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, entered Sandra Kay Daniels’ class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School and reportedly whispered in [...]

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees religious freedom to all citizens; and the first clause of that amendment prohibits Congress from passing a law “respecting an establishment of religion.” Known as the Establishment Clause, this passage has been interpreted generally to prevent Congress from establishing a national religion or the federal government [...]

The New York Times’ analysis of the deal in Washington to raise the debt ceiling quoted remarks made Sunday by Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, in an appearance on ABC. El-Erian offered his assessment of the effects of cutting federal spending: “Unemployment will be higher than it would have been [...]

I felt a pang of despair earlier this month when I heard about the ExxonMobil pipeline oil spill in the Yellowstone River. The longest undammed river in the lower 48 states, the Yellowstone drains a portion of the Rocky Mountains and feeds into the Missouri River in North Dakota. My family has seen the lovely [...]

Ira Sheskin, Ph.D., conducted the 2004 Twin Cities Jewish Population Study, the federation-commissioned, in-depth study of Jewish demographics in our urban communities. As it happened, Sheskin, the director of the Jewish Demography Project of the Sue and Leonard Miller Center for Contemporary Judaic Studies at the University of Miami, was the featured presenter at the [...]

Perhaps by the time you read this editorial, Gov. Mark Dayton will have called the Legislature back for a brief special session and hammered out an agreement to resolve the $1.8 billion gap between his and the Legislature’s budget proposals; or some type of interim funding scheme will be devised to keep the lights on [...]

As the 2012 elections approach, the issue of U.S. policy toward Israel will emerge again as a partisan political football. It’s an immutable fact of life, like reality TV and taxes — in the even-numbered years. This tactic plays out in federal races, for congressional seats and the presidency, as Republicans try to pull some [...]

In August 2010, a delegation of American Muslim scholars and spiritual leaders toured European concentration camps. The group of men and one woman had varying degrees of knowledge about the history of the Shoah going in. After their experience, they issued a statement that strongly denounced anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
One of the Muslim leaders on [...]

I asked the Dalai Lama a question this past weekend.
Tenzin Gyatso, the man that Tibetans refer to as His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, visited Minnesota. He was hosted by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing and the Tibetan-American Foundation of Minnesota. The Twin Cities have the second largest Tibetan community in [...]