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 [...]

Works of art can pose moral questions in unique ways. In the case of the Holocaust, vexing moral issues continue to provoke us more than 65 years after the liberation of the death camps. A stylishly made documentary, Strictly Confidential, which is screening as part of the 2011 Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, probes the [...]

Passover, which begins after sundown on Monday, April 18, has several names. It is commonly called Chag HaPesach, the Feast of Passover; or Chag HaMatzot, the Feast of Unleavened Bread. In Deuteronomy (16:1), God instructs us to observe Chag HaAviv, the Feast of Spring, which involves sacrifices, refraining from eating leavened bread, etc.
Pesach is [...]

Execute true justice; deal kindly and compassionately with one another. Do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor. — Zechariah 7:8-10 (from The Hebrew Prophets, translation and annotation by Rabbi Rami Shapiro)

We are witnessing a right-wing ideological assault on the working class and labor unions that is unprecedented in United [...]

The showdown between Wisconsin public employees and Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature is in its third week. Rather than simmering down, the political conflict ramped up this past weekend with the largest rally yet — a crowd variously estimated at from 70,000 to 100,000 union workers and supporters gathered Saturday at the Capitol [...]