All of his friends were moving on with their lives and heading off to college, but Sebastián Flores Cerritos felt stuck. Sebastián felt he couldn’t embark on his own journey until he could live a life true to himself. In 2010, he summoned the courage to tell his parents that he felt deeply uncomfortable in …Read More
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Last month, 10 rabbis from across the U.S. spent a week in the Dominican Republic as part of a Global Justice Fellowship trip with AJWS. Focusing heavily on the Dominican government’s policies related to the citizenship status of Dominicans of Haitian descent, the delegation met with grantees working to address some of the most pressing human rights issues in the region. Rabbi Elyse Winick, the Jewish chaplain at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, wrote this reflection at the end of the trip.
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What a month! LGBT Pride Month has come and gone, but it will go down in American history as one of the momentous times for LGBT rights.
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Originally published by Quorum, a project of The Daily Beast. On Human Rights Day in December 2014, activists from around the world gathered at The Daily Beast’s “#Quorum: Global LGBT Voices” to share their struggles and achievements in working for LGBT rights worldwide. Essy, a Kenyan activist who works for AJWS grantee Persons Marginalized and …Read More
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New York, NY – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of three women currently sitting on the United States Supreme Court, has co-authored a feminist reading for the Jewish holiday of Passover, which begins at sundown on Friday, April 3, 2015.
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Grace is the mother of seven children. She lives in Democratic Republic of Congo, a country rife with ethnic conflict that has been called “the rape capital of the world” by U.N. officials. In addition to the vulnerability of being a woman in a war-torn region, Grace and her family are Pygmy, an ethnic minority …Read More
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Dayanara, a woman from Nicaragua, came out to her family as transgender when she was a teenager. Ostracized by her parents and siblings, and thrown out of her home, Dayanara became a sex worker to support herself financially. She lived on the streets for years, developed a drug addiction and ended up in prison, where …Read More
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Homophobic hatred sizzled in Haiti’s streets last summer. Religious leaders marched throughout the country to protest same-sex relationships and stir up anti-LGBT sentiment. As these extremists launched a vicious campaign, Haiti’s small, but growing number of advocates for LGBT rights—like the aptly named AJWS grantee Kouraj (Courage)—spoke out.
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In Guatemala, very few young people have access to quality reproductive health care and sexual health education. Only 44 percent of women of reproductive age use any kind of contraceptives. The maternal mortality rate—the proportion of pregnancies that end in the mother’s death—is the second worst in Latin America and is especially high among indigenous …Read More
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Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in the Dominican Republic have long faced discrimination and violence in their communities. But in recent years they have begun to speak out, advocate for their rights, and build a movement calling for change in Dominican society so that they can live as equal citizens whose rights are …Read More
Read MoreParashat Shmini begins as the week of inaugural worship in the Mishkan, the desert temple that enabled God to dwell among the Israelites, is coming to a close. But tragedy strikes when two young priestly acolytes, Nadav and Avihu, die at the altar. It is a brief and puzzling story: we are simply told that each brought his incense pan and offered incense on “strange fire,” even though God had not commanded it of them. And the next thing we know, they are consumed by God’s fire.
Read MoreWhat does it mean to “count”? To count can mean to tally items to determine the total—as in, the teacher counted her students. To count can also mean to have merit, importance or value—as in, every little bit of help counts. In Parashat Ki Tisa, God instructs Moshe to count the Jewish people. Men over the age of twenty are included in this census, and each is commanded to donate a half-shekel, which is used for the construction and upkeep of the Tabernacle.
Read MoreParashat Miketz continues the narrative of Joseph and his brothers. It describes Joseph’s ascent to power, the trust he earns from Pharaoh and his power as a minister over all of Egypt. It also mentions, in passing, a woman whose life becomes entwined with Joseph’s: Osnat, daughter of the Priest of Ohn. Osnat receives a bare four sentences, and is never again mentioned in the Tanach. Who is she, and what can we learn from her presence in the text?
Read MoreAnu Mokal was four months pregnant the night policemen brutally assaulted her at a bus stop in Satara, India. They beat her so severely that she suffered a miscarriage. When she later filed a complaint against them, no investigation took place, despite the presence of witnesses. Why? Because she was a sex worker, and the policemen—who had charged her with soliciting clients at the bus stop—were just ‘doing their job.’
Read MoreParashat Vayishlach contains the harrowing story of the rape of Dina and its equally violent aftermath. Dina “goes out” to see the daughters of the town of Shchem. Instantly Shchem, the son of Chamor, sees her, takes her and defiles her. He then falls in love with her and asks for her hand in marriage. Dina’s father, Yaakov, is unable to offer a response, remaining silent and waiting for his sons to return home from the field. As a form of retaliation, two of Yaakov’s sons, Shimon and Levi, slay all of the men of Shchem and take the women and children as captives.
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