Nearly a year and a half after a U.S. foreign service officer was revealed to be the author of a racist and antisemitic blog, he is still employed at the State Department — and he still posts on the website on a near-daily basis.

Fritz Berggren, who has worked with Afghan immigrants and in Bahrain, runs a website called BloodAndFaith.com that frequently assails the Jewish faith, members of the LGBTQ community and Black Americans, and argues that the United States should be a Christian nation-state. In February 2021, ...

Jerry Nadler was fishing for votes outside Zabar’s, that purveyor of bagels and babka on Manhattan’s West Side, when Carole Kaufmann stopped to take the congressman’s campaign flier.

“A heymisher man,” said Kaufmann, 86, using the Yiddish word for familiar as she admired the 75-year-old Democrat in his blue suit, red striped tie and sensible shoes. Nadler is Jewish, and Kaufmann likes that about him.

“I want him around,” Kaufmann...

When Steve Dettelbach was confirmed last week as the director of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he became the beleaguered bureau’s first head to pass a Senate confirmation in eight years. For some, the confirmation offered hope of a changing tide in America’s sea of mass shootings.

But a county Republican group in Kentucky saw a different story: that Dettelbach is part of a “Jewish junta” that “is getting stronger and more aggressive.”

The Bracken County Republican Party, representing a rural county with a population of around 8,400...

Members of minority faith and belief communities had mixed reactions after the recent Supreme Court ruling that said the Constitution protected a high school football coach in Washington who prayed on the field after games.

Some worried the high court’s ruling isn’t necessarily...

A Jewish summer camp in southern California is reassuring families after a prominent anti-LGBTQ Twitter account, Libs of TikTok, called attention to a year-old “diversity and inclusion” statement on its website.

“Camp Ramah, which owns tens of camps across the country, announced they are housing kids according to their gender identity rather than birth sex,” the account tweeted Wednesday afternoon. It linked to ...

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some religious leaders celebrated the decision. Others denounced it. 

"It's just horrifying and frustrating and angering, and that feeling hasn't gone away and isn't going to go away," Rabbi Bonnie Margulis said. 

Margulis is the chair of the Wisconsin Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. She said she...

A panel of Tennessee judges has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a couple who alleged that a state-sponsored Christian adoption agency refused to help them because they are Jewish.

The lawsuit against the state challenged a 2020 law that installed legal protections for private adoption agencies to reject state-funded placement of children to parents based on religious beliefs.

Much of the criticism of the law had focused on how it allowed adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people...

Pam Scheininger and J. David Bleich have this much in common: They are Orthodox Jews who are preoccupied with Jewish ethics and teach at New York City law schools.

But when Scheininger looks at an American map, she sees 16 states where Orthodox Jewish women would not be able to have an abortion otherwise sanctioned by Jewish law. Bleich sees a different number — zero.

Disagreements among Jews over where Jewish and state laws intersect on abortion, once theoretical, have taken on urgency in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this week overturning Roe v. Wade...

Lizzy Duke-Moe, a Boise High School graduate who is attending Brown University in the fall, was spurred into action last week to counter a local Baptist pastor who called for the death of all gay people.

Duke-Moe said in an email that her mom, Keely Duke, and stepmom, Sarah Seidl are married — “they got married in Idaho,” Duke-Moe said, and her mother had shown her an article about the pastor’s sermons. “And...

Sabrina Hodak grew up in a Modern Jewish Orthodox family but only truly embraced Judaism at age 16, around the same time she understood she was bisexual.

It was an upsetting and confusing time, because the same religious mentors who helped her strengthen her beliefs kept saying her sexuality would conflict with her faith.

“That was very frustrating, because I also knew that a lot of other religious people believed that,” said Hodak, now a 19-year-old psychology major at Florida International University. In her journal, she kept asking, “Can I please just find...

In 1990, American Jews decided they had no future.

That was the year the National Jewish Population Survey—then the most comprehensive study of American Jewry ever undertaken—revealed that more than half of America’s Jews, 52%, were intermarried. Though the report itself was even-keeled in its analysis, the reaction among many Jews veered toward panic.

Intermarried couples weren’t raising their...

Yeshiva University (YU) will now be required to formally recognize an LGBTQ student group following a Tuesday ruling by a New York state judge.

Judge Lynn Kotler of the New York County Supreme Court determined that despite the private university’s “proud and rich Jewish heritage,” it is not a religious organization. Therefore,  the institution is subject to the New York Human Rights Law, which bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Kotler ordered the school to provide the club, known as the YU Pride Alliance, with “full and equal accommodations,...

A new Florida law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks with some exceptions violates religious freedom rights of Jews in addition to the state constitution’s privacy protections, a synagogue claims in a lawsuit.

The lawsuit filed by the Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor of Boynton Beach contends the law that takes effect July 1 violates Jewish teachings, which state abortion “is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman” and for other reasons.

“As such, the act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government...

Each Saturday, several members of a Jewish congregation are called up to the podium to bless the Torah before a portion of it is read aloud. This calling forward, called an aliyah, is considered an honor.

But the pronouns used to summon people in Hebrew are gendered. What’s a congregational leader to do when summoning a nonbinary person who identifies as neither exclusively male nor exclusively female?

Now the Conservative movement has formalized a series of Hebrew terms service leaders can use to call nonbinary people to Torah honors. The opinion by the...

Religious leaders, elected officials among others attended a ceremony at the Jewish Community Center on Sunday to show unity after a fire destroyed the Chabad of Kentucky back in April.

On April 23, firefighters were called around 4 a.m. to respond to the headquarters for Chabad of Kentucky in Almara Circle after a grease fire broke out, spokesperson for the Saint Matthews Fire Department Rick Tonini said.

Firefighters were able...