“Prayer,” Laura Ben-David
“On a photo tour of a community of recent Bnei Menashe immigrants from India, I happened upon an elderly woman who was absorbed in prayer. The lines in her weathered hands, perfectly in sync with the lines in the well-worn prayer book, were mesmerizing.” Laura Ben-David
ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Laura Ben-David Read More »
Actress Rose McGowan, who’s been leading the Twitter crusade against Harvey Weinstein, was penalized by Twitter for posting a tweet about Weinstein that contained a private phone number – a violation of their Terms of Service. On Thursday morning, Oct 12, Twitter issued a statement that McGowan’s account would be temporarily frozen because of this violation.
We have been in touch with Ms. McGowan's team. We want to explain that her account was temporarily locked because one of her Tweets included a private phone number, which violates our Terms of Service. 1/3
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) October 12, 2017
This didn’t fly well with the Twitter community. The freeze manifested into a worldwide one-day Twitter boycott on Friday, Oct 13, with many users adopting the hashtag #WomenBoycottTwitter.
In solidarity with McGowan (a victim of Weinstein’s sexual transgressions), comedian Chelsea Handler, Emmy-nominated host Billy Eichner, and “Catfish” host Nev Schulman joined the protest.
#WomenBoycottTwitter because we deserve it and so does Twitter. Shame on you
— Chelsea Handler (@chelseahandler) October 13, 2017
Proudly joining #WomenBoycottTwitter for the next 24 hours even though Instagram doesn't properly capture my tone.
— billy eichner (@billyeichner) October 13, 2017
I stand proudly with women. #WomenBoycottTwitter pic.twitter.com/A1UtswSepj
— Nēv Schulman (@NevSchulman) October 13, 2017
(Although, it should be mentioned, Eichner broke his Twitter silence to post about President Trump addressing the Values Voter Summit, but he resumed his boycott soon after.)
Must take a break from #WomenBoycottTwitter as today Trump spoke to an overtly anti-LGBT hate group. Silence = Death. #Impeach https://t.co/ZhbYP3zard
— billy eichner (@billyeichner) October 13, 2017
The Day Twitter Fell Silent: How Harvey Weinstein Inadvertently Caused a Twitter Boycott Read More »
A remarkable story has emerged of a Holocaust survivor leaving her father behind on the train cars headed for Auschwitz and receiving a message from him years later.
The 92-year-old survivor, identified as Klara Prowisor, told filmmaker Matan Rochlitz that she, her husband Philippe Szyper and her father were all forced by the Nazis to ride the train cars to Auschwitz. Szyper repeatedly insisted that they jump out of the car in Belgium, but Prowisor initially resisted because her father had become gravely ill and didn’t want to leave his side. Others in the train car didn’t want them to jump because the Nazis threatened to punish them if anyone was missing.
However, after sleeping on it she eventually decided to jump.
“I left my father,” said Prowisor, “and it was so painful. I abandoned my father in such terrible conditions.”
Szyper jumped shortly after Prowisor, and Belgian citizens provided them refuge until the war was over.
One evening in 1962, when Prowisor and Szyper were visiting Tel Aviv, they were walking down Dizengoff Street when Prowisor was approached a woman who said she had been looking for Prowisor for 20 years because she witnessed Prowisor’s father wake up after Prowisor had jumped. Prowisor’s father told her to relay a message to Prowisor.
“If you ever meet my daughter again, tell her I’m the happiest father,” Prowisor’s father told the woman. “I’m glad she jumped.”
Prowisor learned from the woman that her father had passed away on the train before the train had reached Auschwitz.
“He had this intuition to tell me, ‘You did the right thing,’” said Prowisor. “I live with that. A weight fell off me.”
She later added, “It was so important for me to hear this woman pass on my father’s message to me. It’s exceptional. It’s a gift … from God.”
Prowisor then said she didn’t believe in God.
The woman who relayed the message to Prowisor has never been identified, but it is believed that she was Dutch.
The full video can be seen below, via the New York Times:
President Trump announced on Friday that he will not recertify the Iran nuclear deal and will implement sanctions against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), moves that could have major implications on the United States’ Middle East policy going forward.
Trump delivered his announcement at the White House and declared that he “cannot and will not make this certification.”
“We will not continue down a path whose predictable conclusion is more violence, more terror and the very real threat of Iran’s nuclear breakout,” said Trump. “I am directing my administration to work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal’s many serious flaws so that the Iranian regime can never threaten the world with nuclear weapons.”
The president outlined ways that the deal could be improved, including eliminating the deal’s provisions that eventually remove restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program and adding in provisions that deal with Iran’s missile proliferation. If Congress fails to implement these changes, then Trump announced that he will nix the Iran deal altogether.
Trump also declared that the IRGC will be slapped with sanctions for their support for terror, although he stopped short of designating them as a terrorist organization.
“We hope that these new measures directed at the Iranian dictatorship will compel the government to re-evaluate its pursuit of terror at the expense of its people,” said Trump.
Under the Iran nuclear deal, the president has to decide every 90 days if the Iranian regime is complying with the deal. If the president thinks it isn’t, he can decertify the deal and give Congress 60 days to amend the agreement or re-impose sanctions on the Iranian regime. Congress is reportedly planning on proposing tougher restrictions on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs with the threat of re-imposing sanctions if Iran refuses to accept such restrictions.
Trump has repeatedly slammed the deal as “one of the worst and one-sided deals” that America agreed to. Britain, France and Germany have re-iterated their defense of the Iran deal in light of Trump’s announcement, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump.
“If the Iran deal is left unchanged, one thing is absolutely certain- in a few years’ time, the world’s foremost terrorist regime will have an arsenal of nuclear weapons and that’s tremendous danger for our collective future,” Netanyahu said in a video statement. “President Trump has just created an opportunity to fix this bad deal, to roll back Iran’s aggression and to confront its criminal support of terrorism.”
For both sides of the decertification debate, be sure to check out Larry Greenfield’s column in the Journal in favor of decertification and Dalia Dassa Kaye’s Journal column against decertification, as well as Journal political editor Shmuel Rosner’s analysis.
Trump decertifies Iran deal, slaps Iran Revolutionary Guard with sanctions Read More »
Jewish millennials are familiar with the widely popular dating app JSwipe and the longtime dating website JDate. Now, a brand new Jewish dating app has come on the scene, and it was not created by Jews.
Created by a couple of Sikh entrepreneurs, the Shalom app was launched on Wednesday and is being sold as the middle ground between casual dating and more serious relationship seeking. Most dating apps provide users with a random selection of people to swipe left or right to get possible matches. Shalom, by contrast, creates a selection pool that’s less random. It searches for likely matches based on “social media profiles, and behavioral data, like how users have interacted with others on the app, in order to make connections,” according to Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).
“We think we definitely have a better product and the back-end technology stacked to actually match people based on data,” KJ Dhaliwal, one of the app’s co-creators, told JTA. “We do a lot of work in making sure our algorithms are set up in a way that actually results in people matching with people they end up marrying one day.”
Interestingly, Dhaliwal, his co-creator Sukhmeet Toor and their team in San Francisco, CA all consist of non-Jews. But they have prior success in the field of dating apps, as their prior app, Dil Mill, has become the South Asian version of Tinder. Dil Mill uses the same formula that Shalom uses.
Dhaliwal told JTA that he figured that the Jewish community would be perfect for an app using that kind of formula given the similarities between the Jewish and South Asian community “in terms of the values around community, the values around family, the values around marriage.”
Dhaliwal and Toor certainly have their work cut out for them in competing against JSwipe, the app that already claims the mantle of the “Jewish Tinder”, boasts a four-star review on Google Apps, and already has 410,000 users. But perhaps these Sikh entrepreneurs will be savvy enough to establish Shalom as a viable alternative in the lucrative market of Jewish dating.
‘Shalom’: New Dating App Launches Read More »
Sela
Eight hundred years before
the common era and we
pick up this beginning in the
middle of a conversation.
Isaiah, talking the talk of
the Prize Fighter. Reminding us
who’s had our backs
(and our fronts) this whole time,
since the first blade of grass
touched the first human foot.
Sela
Let’s sing a new song.
Let’s remember when the Earth
still had that new planet smell,
long before enemies were
vanquished on our behalf
by the One who exchanged
ribs like Legos.
Sela
Babylonia may be lovely this
time of year, but for some reason
this vacation makes us fill the river
with our tears.
It’s a long way home and
the turnpike is on fire.
It’s okay – We’ve got the
double capitalized triple A.
Roadside Service Deluxe.
Available twenty four hours day.
Sela
It’s almost three thousand years later
All I can see is gold.
Los Angeles poet Rick Lupert created the Poetry Super Highway (an online publication and resource for poets), and hosted the Cobalt Cafe weekly poetry reading for almost 21 years. He’s authored 21 collections of poetry, including “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion“, “I’m a Jew, Are You” (Jewish themed poems) and “Feeding Holy Cats” (Poetry written while a staff member on the first Birthright Israel trip), and most recently “Donut Famine” (Rothco Press, December 2016) and edited the anthologies “Ekphrastia Gone Wild”, “A Poet’s Haggadah”, and “The Night Goes on All Night.” He writes the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” with fellow Los Angeles poet Brendan Constantine. He’s widely published and reads his poetry wherever they let him.
Let’s Rest Before It Even Starts – a poem for Haftorah Breishit by Rick Lupert Read More »
