By this time next week, many of us will still be recovering from a Thanksgiving meal like no other before in our lifetime. Though we will be comforted by immediate family and familiar foods, the family and friends we typically invite will be missing from most of our tables, perhaps replaced by phone or zoom calls to loved ones, granting a bittersweet aura to our festivities. The past half-year has brought insecurity, isolation, and loss to so many. For some, next week will likely not be a Thanksgiving at all, as many Americans remain in the throes of grief or financial insolvency. To them, we owe our commitment—to continue taking the threat of coronavirus seriously and to perform whatever measures, no matter how inconvenient, will result in a safer and swifter conclusion to this pandemic. But we also owe them what we owe ourselves in this Thanksgiving season—the opportunity to [...]

On this day in 1887, the great Jewish American poet Emma Lazarus passed away at the age of 38. Born in 1849, Lazarus is best remembered as the poet who wrote “The New Colossus,” written in 1883 as part of a fundraising effort to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty and engraved upon the base of the statue. Though the Statue of Liberty was initially designed as a symbol of the enduring friendship between the United States and France, Lazarus’ poem, coupled with her fierce commitment to immigration and immigrants’ rights, transformed the statue into symbol of the warm welcome she hoped America would ultimately provide to all immigrants, regardless of origin. Though she remains best known for this poem and her immigration advocacy, Lazarus also devoted her considerable talents toward combatting the rise of anti-Semitism and promoting Zionism, reminding us all that, as American Jews, we can [...]

On this day in 1095, Pope Urban II opened the Council of Clermont, summoned to plan the First Crusade, Host to more than two hundred bishops, the Council decreed that a pilgrimage to Jerusalem made every other penance superfluous, igniting one of the darkest periods in European Jewish history. Though the Jews of France supplied food and funds for the Crusaders’ journey, by the time they reached Germany, many Crusaders decided to spread the “Kingdom of God” at home before proceeding to the “Holy Land,” striking at four Jewish communities along the Rhine—Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. While the Jews of Europe had suffered from anti-Jewish legislation, even violence, prior to the Crusades, the sheer ferocity of the attacks represented a new development, one that widened the gulf separating the Jewish and Christian communities for most of the next millennia and opened the door to several of the most tragic [...]