Within a 10-day period, recent attacks including the December 3rd incident at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown, the drive by shooting in Redlands, California on December 12th, the antisemitic terrorist attack at a Jewish Hanukkah…
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When Saying ‘I’m Jewish’ Reminds Me of Our Strength and Why Israel Matters
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Scheduling a Festival on the Heels of War
Historic accounts often frame war in romantic and distant terms, charting points on the arc of history — where clashes give way to ideas and nation-states emerge vanquished or victors. The American novelist Stephen Crane, in his novel The Red…
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Why Australia’s Antisemitism Feels Like a Warning
What a violent attack in Australia exposes about Jewish vulnerability in Canada An antisemitic attack targeting Jewish life in Australia just as the Jewish world was about to celebrate the first light of Hanukkah left a community shaken and once…
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A Festival of Light, a Moment of Darkness: Australia’s Bondi Tragedy
What should have been a joyful celebration of Hanukkah in Sydney—the Festival of Lights, a time to honor religious freedom and the victory of hope over oppression—turned into a horrific scene of violence that has reverberated not just through…
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They can’t extinguish our light: Bondi reflections
Australia is my childhood landscape, my parents and family are there — my grandparents buried in its soil I grew up amongst Holocaust Survivors, silently listening to how they chose this place of refuge because it was the far edge of the world,…
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From Settlement to Sanctuary: Israel’s Call to Illuminate the World
In the rolling hills of Canaan, after decades of trials, exile from his homeland, deceit at the hands of Laban, the wrenching loss of Rachel, and reconciliation with Esau, Jacob yearned for peace. He had built his family, weathered storms, and…
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Light a Candle, Pass a Law: Australia’s Theatre of Solidarity after Bondi
Bondi wasn’t a failure of gun laws — it was a triumph of political denial. Aftermath The Bondi Beach attack was not a policy failure. It was a moral one. Fifteen Jews murdered, dozens wounded, in what was clearly an antisemitic terror…
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Taming the Digital Golem: Spirituality and AI
Why Clergy Need to Stop Tiptoeing Around AI (and Start Using It Intentionally) A few months ago, I published AI for Clergy, a book that grew out of a simple observation: nearly every rabbi, pastor, imam, and chaplain I meet is curious about…
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From Sydney to October 7: The same hatred, the same Western blindness
An antisemitic shooting in Sydney, during Hanukkah. Jews murdered for being Jews. Families celebrating light, cut down by hatred. How can one not think of October 7? Same logic. Same hatred. The same pogrom—geographically displaced. This crime…
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Bondi, Blood, and Bibi’s Blame Game
I’m writing this as an Israel-loving, proud diaspora Jew who is grieving. Not abstractly, not politically, but viscerally… after the mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia on Sunday. 15 people were killed…
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