Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

There is an old Dr. Seuss book, “Dilly Goes to Delancey Street,” that features a black-bearded, hook-nosed Jewish man leering at a pair of little girls in white pinafores.

The Cleveland Jewish News has reported on the normalization treaty signed last August between Israel and the United Arab Emirates. My perspective on this positive development is based on experience in the UAE including a visit last month during which – thanks to an introduction from the Jewi…

I was 6 years old in 1976 when Black History Month was officially instituted by President Gerald R. Ford for national observance. I still recall how my homeroom teachers, February after February, would display pictures of famous African-Americans – Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Shirle…

It’s not like I didn’t know what was coming.

It’s almost a law of nature. Today’s media fixation displaces the prior one and bad news drives out good. In 2020, COVID-19 and the US presidential election sucked the oxygen from other topics, large and small, including Israel. Its historic, region-transforming breakthroughs in relations wi…

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, I had lunch with an elderly cousin because I was interested in the history of our family – why we fled Europe, how we ended up in Cleveland, and what it was like growing up in a home of immigrants. What began initially as an earnest inquiry into family roots r…

Last week, we were saddened by the news of the passing of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of England and world-famous Jewish philosopher and author.

I’m a Holocaust brat. Kind of like an Army brat, except that traveling never ends. Once exposed to the Holocaust, it stays with you. But my story is different. While other Holocaust brats remember the cruelty, I remember the goodness.

There are moments in time that take our breath away. We ponder what we believe. We question why things happen. We wonder if a situation will resolve and whether or not we will have the strength to persist.

In June, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland adopted a set of policy recommendations to help achieve safe and accessible elections in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Guided by our Jewish values and our commitment to public health, we strongly believe that people should not have to choose b…

As philosopher and playwright Mike Tyson once said: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

As a pre-teen, I memorized the entire ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. At age 11, I had The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s cadence and hand gestures down exactly. My parents would often direct me to recite it when friends and family would stop by our home.

Regardless of occasional claims to the contrary, Judaism does not command that we support a specific political party, candidate or point of view. Neither does the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), the Talmud or any other sacred Jewish text.

The realities of COVID-19 have imposed restrictions on how we are able to serve the community.

With Cleveland’s Jewish community comfortably living across Cleveland’s east side suburbs, its easy to forget that the original developers of those communities wanted to prohibit Jews and African Americans from living in parts of Shaker, Heights, Beachwood, University Heights, Moreland Hills…

Today, we begin Elul and next month, Rosh Hashanah. Thoughts of reconciliation should tint everything we do. We should reconcile with people in all our relationships – friends, acquaintances, family and extended family.

I love Beachwood, but as a Black resident with two sons at Beachwood Middle School and a daughter at Beachwood High School, I am furious. A Beachwood police officer firing two shots into the side of a car of a suspected shoplifter at Beachwood Place in June 2019 as he drove away should make …