Thai transgender activist Nada Chaiyajit completed her undergraduate studies in August, and two months later, school officials told her 12 classmates – all men – that their graduation certificates were ready. But her college, the University of Phayao in northern Thailand, would not issue her documents because she submitted a photo in which she looks …Read More
Read MoreThailand is among the world’s most dangerous countries in which to oppose powerful interests that profit from coal plants, toxic waste dumping, land grabs or illegal logging. Some 60 people who spoke out on these issues have been killed over the past 20 years, although few perpetrators have been prosecuted in a culture in which …Read More
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Despite global praise for Burma’s democratic reforms, the country hasn’t resolved its decades-long legacy of ethnic persecution. Burma’s refugees fear what will happen to them next. To learn more, American Jewish World Service’s Elizabeth Daube interviewed refugees living along the Thailand-Burma border. Naw Htee Ku doesn’t want to talk about the past. She’s sitting on a concrete floor not …Read More
Read MoreEver since it was given over three thousand years ago on Shavuot, the Torah has offered Jews a vision of how the world should work. I was thinking about this vision this past December when I was asked to represent HIAS (the 120-year-old Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) at a United Nations conference in Geneva dealing …Read More
Read MoreOn November 19, 2012 at 7:00 AM, two villagers from Khlong Sai Phatthana in Surat Thani province in southern Thailand were shot and killed less than 800 meters from their homes. They were on a motorcycle en route to their local open-air market to sell the vegetables they had farmed on their land that week. …Read More
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