KIRYAT SHMONA, Israel —As we made the short drive from city hall to his home in this city just over a mile from the Lebanese border, Mayor Avichai Stern pointed out some of the buildings that have been hit by rocket and anti-tank guided missile attacks. “A missile hit there,” Stern said, pointing at one building next to the northern Israeli town’s main shopping mall. “The Soldier’s House [a civilian-run hostel for troops] was hit twice. You see the damage there to the wall? It doesn’t stand out so much now — if you didn’t know to look, you might not see it — but the whole city is like that ..read more

When Rabbi Jeremy Ruberg first heard about a regional fellowship geared toward teaching rabbis new methods to better serve their communities, he jumped at a chance to update what he views as “Rabbinate 2.0.” Ruberg, the rabbi for lifelong learning at Temple Emanu-El in Closter, N.J., is one of 11 cross-denominational fellows embarking on the Atra Northern New Jersey Rabbinic (re)Design Fellowship, an 18-month program that seeks to enhance Jewish life in the area by offering rabbis new skills and methods to reach their communities. Atra, the organization initially launched as the Center for ..read more

Once again, the topic of American Jews criticizing Israel is heating up, and conversation about if and how and who we should or should not criticize is everywhere. This is nothing new, of course. From the time of Joseph and his brothers, we’ve fought amongst ourselves. The Sadducees and the Pharisees didn’t agree. The Maccabees and the Hellenist Jews fought. Hillel and Shammai argued. Even during the Shoah — in our darkest hour — some Jews felt it was best to sit on the Jewish councils to save lives and others fought as partisans in the forests, and they loathed each other. During the foundi ..read more

Columbia used to be a university. I now see it as the burial ground of many foundational concepts of the contemporary American Jewish experience. Here you go again, I hear you saying, exaggerating, dramatizing, catastrophizing. After all, aren’t we talking about a few hundred students and a few radical professors doing something that most Americans ignore or deride? True, the “protests” aren’t representative of America, and probably not of most Columbia students; but they are what Argentinian psychoanalyst Enrique Pichon-Rivière calls a “social emergent.” According to Pichon-Riviere, the em ..read more

Sharon Nazarian, the president of her family’s foundation and chair of the advisory board for UCLA’s Israel studies center, which it funds, stressed the necessity of the department in light of demands by anti-Israel activists on the campus — and across the country — to boycott both Israeli academic institutions and the department, calling such demands “blatant censorship” on par with “book burning.” Following the violence on campus between anti-Israel protesters and counterprotesters, Nazarian, who also teaches a course on antisemitism at UCLA, released a statement on behalf of her family ex ..read more

As the last generation of Holocaust survivors ages, and with antisemitism and Holocaust denial and distortion spreading across social media, a new digital campaign, launched on Thursday by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, will spotlight survivor testimony that debunks misinformation. The project comes ahead of Yom HaShoah — Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day —which begins Sunday night. The day will resonate differently this year, as Jews worldwide are focused on the aftermath of a more recent crisis, the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel and the 133 hostages remaini ..read more

The philosopher Richard Rorty famously argued that a culture’s moral aspirations can be discerned from the metaphors it favors. A culture that praises being “a faithful cog in the great wheel” is not going to smile on disruptive innovation, and a nation that talks about “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” might prefer entrepreneurial grit to social welfare. What does it say about Jewish culture that we so ubiquitously use the metaphor of the Jewish journey” to describe the experience of being Jewish in America today? Perhaps it is time to consider a new metaphor: “Jewish homecoming.”&nb ..read more

As one of the more prominent Jewish institutions on a college campus, Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity houses have often been targets for antisemitic activities. But this has given them deep, friendly connections to campus administrators, which have become particularly useful, AEPi CEO Rob Derdiger told eJewishPhilanthropy Managing Editor Judah Ari Gross in the latest installment of “Get Your Phil.” From a one to a four: “Many, many of our brothers kind of come into AEPi because the barriers to entry are very low, but they feel the the pull of Jewish community. And then through their involvement i ..read more

Good Wednesday morning. In today’s edition ofYour Daily Phil, we report on the Israeli mentorship programPerach’s wartime struggles, and feature an opinion piece byRobert Lichtmanproposing a model for greater federation-foundation collaboration. Also in this newsletter:David M. Shribman,Rabbi Menachem CreditorandSheryl Sandberg.We’ll start with the Jewish community’s response to the ongoing anti-Israel protests on college campuses. Universities from coast to coastsaw major anti-Israel demonstrations over the Passover holiday — several of them violent —with protest leaders on several campuse ..read more

Since 1973, the nonprofit Perach, which pairs university student “mentors” with elementary school-age “mentees” from disadvantaged backgrounds, has built a prestigious program based on the power of one-to-one tutorship. But that connection was tested as never before after the terror attacks of Oct. 7. Perach mentor and law student Sarit Sivan, 23, was evacuated from her home in the southern town of Ofakim to the Tel Aviv area, as was her young mentee from Sderot. Their initial meetings in the weeks after the start of the war were more complicated over Zoom, but eventually the two were able m ..read more