Features
TULSA — Wearing a tattered house robe and with a cigarette dangling from her hand, the pregnant woman in a low-income neighborhood opened the door.
Would she cut down on smoking now that her first child was on the way, the expectant mother was asked by the visiting nurse?
The response: “This baby has taken everything else from me and she’s not going to take the cigarettes, too, and if you ask me to do anything else I’m going to slap you in the face.”
But then the woman confessed to having abused young children as a babysitter and expressed fears that she would do the same to her child.
That’s where the nurse and Dr. David Olds, to whom the health-care worker reported back, saw an opening. The young woman wanted help, and thanks to a pioneering program called Nurse Family Partnership she received it.
SCOTTSDALE — Matt Bycer is like any other 33-year-old attorney who wakes up at the crack of dawn to exercise.
Except that rather than sweating to a P90X regimen, Bycer, in a T-shirt, shorts and cowboy hat, lugs 170 buckets of water across his backyard in Scottsdale, Ariz., to water his etrog farm.
The Phoenix native has been nurturing his citron project since he first started collecting etrogs in 2007. With a 60% survival rate for each etrog tree he plants, Bycer is optimistic that he’ll b...
CHATTANOOGA — Sometimes, Benjamin Rosenthal thinks about leaving the small town of Indianola, Miss., pop. 11,000, where he spent most of his life.
He wants to go somewhere bigger, with more Jews.
“It’s very easy to lose your identity in the Bible Belt in a town when you are the religious minority,” said Rosenthal, 25.
In the Bible Belt, religion rules and Jesus is king, particularly in the small towns and cities that make up the region in the US South.
Jews comprise less than 1% of t...
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ATTORNEY-activist Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, head of Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center in Tel Aviv and one of the most famous women in Israel, promptly answers her office phone at 6 p.m. Israel time.
Although she probably won’t get home to her six children (three are triplets) for several hours — unless court proceedings necessitate a late transatlantic flight — conviction trumps fatigue.
Since 1997, Darshan-Leitner and a group of dedicated lawyers have been on the f...
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JEWMAICA? Can it be? What do Jews and this famous resort country have in common? It all goes back to the familiar narrative of Jewish history. The story of the Jewish people is the story of cycles of diaspora and of new exiles within exiles.
The story of the Caribbean, specifically, of the island of Jamaica, is just such a chapter in this story — the chapter of the conversos and the beginning of the New World.
For hundreds of years, Jews lived rich, fruitful lives i...