Through its description of the devastating famine in ancient Egypt, Parshat Vayigash suggests two models that can inform our response to hunger today. By this point in the biblical narrative, Joseph, Pharaoh’s trusted vizier, has been reunited with his brothers in Egypt. The rest of his family, however, is still suffering from terrible famine in Canaan. …
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The New Republic recently published a piece by Sebastian Strangio that exposes the dark underbelly of microfinance. Strangio highlights a Bangladesh-based story about impoverished rural farmers forced to sell their organs on the black market to repay their microfinance loans. This tragedy emphasizes the growing backlash on the ground and in the academy against microfinance …
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Originally posted on the blog of Where Do You Give? September 1997: I am sitting with my family on the soft, beige carpet in the family room ready to begin our annual tradition. Index cards are lined up in front of us: “Hunger in Africa” “Literacy in America” “Homelessness in Mountain View, CA.” My parents …
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When Jewish comedian Gilda Radner lit a menorah on Saturday Night Live in the 1970s, it was the very first time that lighting Chanukah candles had been broadcast on national television. The skit was a hilarious riff on the ubiquity of Christmas, but what millions of viewers remember most is Gilda. After reciting the blessings over …
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Rectifying pervasive social injustice around our world proves an incredibly daunting and complicated challenge. Each case of injustice is caused by not just the obvious perpetrators, but often myriad unintentional secondary offenders and a seemingly intractable web of social, economic and political systems and power brokers. Given these tangled causes, the average person may feel …
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Where Do You Give? Invites Artists to Reimagine Tzedakah Box for 21st Century New York, NY; December 12, 2011—American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an international development and human rights organization, has launched a national design competition focused on philanthropy and social change. Where Do You Give? challenges artists to create a 21st century icon inspired …
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Foreign policy speeches do not typically give me chills. Not so with the speech that Secretary Clinton gave yesterday evening in Geneva on the evening of December 6th. Her remarks, which I was fortunate enough to hear in person, made a powerful, timely and truly historic argument for the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual …
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By all rights she should have been a nobody. But instead, Sonia Pierre, the Dominican born daughter of Haitian migrants was, at the time of her premature death this week at the age 48, an internationally respected, award winning advocate for the civil and social rights of Haitian Dominicans and a leading grassroots responder to …
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Originally posted on Pursue: Action for a Just World. The U.S. Farm Bill is a piece of legislation that is reauthorized every five to seven years. It covers many food-related government programs like SNAP in addition to international food aid programs. With the failure of the Super Committee to sneak the Farm Bill in under the rug, we have an …
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Hillary Clinton’s visit to Burma—the first from a United States Secretary of State in 50 years—comes to a close today. The trip is a response to what President Obama has referred to as “flickers of hope” in the country and is a significant event in U.S.-Burma relations. How much has actually changed in this repressive …
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