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Human Rights in 2013: Our End-of-Year Top 10

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June 22, 2015 by Nikhil Aziz

“We formed our union to have a collective voice”: Reflections from the Democratic Republic of Congo

Takuinja Ruzibuka of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s South Kivu province rises before dawn to cook, get her eight children ready and work on the family’s vegetable plot for a few hours. Only then does she trek down to the Zola Zola tin mine near Nzibira, where she has been a twangaise (stone breaker) for 19 years. The mine sits on land given in a government concession to multinational corporation BANRO.

June 17, 2015 by AJWS Staff

Nepal Can Recover, But Only If We Change What Is Happening

Originally published in The Huffington Post. I lived in a tent in Nepal as a refugee from Bhutan in the 1990s. And so it broke my heart this month, when I traveled to Nepal in the wake of the recent earthquake and witnessed Nepalese families living in a sea of plastic tents, much like …

March 21, 2015

AJWS Calls on First Lady to Highlight Violence Against Women and Girls While Visiting Cambodia

New York, NY – Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service (AJWS), the leading Jewish international development and human rights organization, issued the following statement in advance of First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to Cambodia: “I commend First Lady Michelle Obama for her historic trip to Cambodia this week to promote the Administration’s ’Let …

March 18, 2015

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Offers Feminist Reading for Passover

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.

January 14, 2015 by AJWS Staff

It’s been five years since Haiti’s earthquake. And the ‘redevelopment’ hasn’t been about helping Haitians.

Originally published in The Washington Post. Five years ago this month, a terrible earthquake struck my country. I was in the capital city, Port-au-Prince, when suddenly the earth shook and buildings around me and across the city collapsed—taking with them hundreds of thousands of lives and the hopes of my nation. The world stood with …

Dvar Tzedek

May 21, 2012 | 5772

Bamidbar

In the beginning of the book of Bamidbar, Moses is instructed to call together all of the Israelites in the wilderness in order to undertake a census of the people. Midrash Bamidbar Rabbah explains the significance of this census by way of a parable about a man who has a box filled with jewels.[1] From …

April 23, 2012 | 5772

Tazria-Metzora

Parshat Tazria-Metzora lays out the biblical prescriptions regarding menstruation, a topic more steeped in critique and apology than almost any other area in Jewish law. Contemporary readers seeking to reconcile the Torah’s approach to menstruation with their own sensibilities typically run up against a few uncomfortable facts. First, the text discusses this natural bodily process …

April 23, 2012 | 5772

Tazria-Metzora

October 31, 2011 | 5772

Lech Lecha

The Loftiness in Leaving and the Rigors of Return Parshat Lech Lecha opens with God’s command to Avram to leave everything that he has known—his birthplace, family and the pagan culture he grew up with—and move to a land “asher arekha—that I will show you.”[1] Avram is asked to leave behind familial binds and unwanted …

October 17, 2011 | 5772

Bereshit

If we were asked to identify the world’s most powerful movers and shakers, storytellers probably wouldn’t make it to the top of our lists. But stories wield tremendous power, shaping our perceptions of others for better or worse. In a fascinating TED Talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story,” Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie …