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1 week ago | 
religionnews.com | Avi Shafran
(RNS) — The car-bombing of a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, has brought increased awareness of “antinatalism,” a movement whose proponents embrace the philosophy that human procreation is unjustifiable and wrong.
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1 week ago | 
amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran
Among the cluster of candidates vying for the New York mayoralty are several (at least currently) longshots for landing in Gracie Mansion, like City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, and content creator/community activist/music artist Paperboy Prince.
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2 weeks ago | 
amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran
“I would note,” the email read, “that their sect is notorious for misogyny and child abuse. I do fear their wanton destruction of the towns and school districts . . .
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2 weeks ago | 
amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran
Right after Simchas Torah 5784, when she and her husband were able to read and hear details of the Hamas attack on Israel, surgeon Dr. Josh Winer’s wife asked him simply, “When are you leaving?” Although it was 20 years since his initial service in the IDF as a lone soldier, she knew where he would be heading.
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1 month ago | 
amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran
I’m still waiting for some college kids with light courseloads and even lighter brainloads to protest in support of those who massacred dozens of innocents in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir last month. After all, the assailants just want to reclaim territory they see as their own. A primer: In 1947, the Indian subcontinent was partitioned by the British (now that, kids, was a colonial power) into mostly Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan.
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1 month ago | 
amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran
Are you very concerned with what’s happening in public schools? I didn’t think so. But, easy as it is for us to be uninterested in schools to which we don’t send our young, there are times when disquiet, even alarm, may be warranted. Like now. Because of a case before the US Supreme Court called Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which oral arguments were heard by the Justices last week. Lead plaintiff Tamer Mahmoud is a Muslim parent in a Montgomery County, Maryland, school.
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1 month ago | 
religionnews.com | Avi Shafran
(RNS) — As someone who looks and dresses the part of the Orthodox Jew I am, I would be gratified were there no rabble-rousing antisemites on American campuses (or streets, or anywhere, for that matter). Antisemites? Yes. Whatever I feel or anyone feels about Israel’s actions in her quest to destroy Hamas, antisemitism bubbles steadily beneath a good amount of ostensibly anti-Israel sentiment. That’s why Jews and Jewish institutions, willy-nilly, have been violently attacked since the Gaza war began.
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1 month ago | 
amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran
$59 billion, in today’s currency. That, according to a report recently compiled by a group called Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, is what the Egyptian government owes the families of Jews who were forced to leave Egypt during the 20th century. The culmination of six years of research, the report documents the substantial cultural and economic contributions of Jews who lived in Egypt in modern times, and the systematic persecution that led to their expulsion.
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1 month ago | 
bostonglobe.com | Avi Shafran
Avi Shafran is an Orthodox rabbi, public affairs director of Agudath Israel of America, and a columnist for Ami Magazine. In 1941, my father, then 14, and a few other somewhat older boys studying in a yeshiva in Vilna (today Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania) were seized by Soviet soldiers and banished to a Siberian labor camp. At the same age, I may have been seized by a teacher for some prank and banished to the principal’s office.
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2 months ago | 
amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran
While a group of Columbia alumni were busy creating a media show by ripping up their diplomas to protest the detention of an anti-Israel protest leader, over in Gaza, demonstrators who had called for the end to the Hamas regime were fleeing into hiding. And for good reason. The regime had just summarily executed at least six anti-Hamas protesters and publicly beaten others.
