USA

    NEW YORK (WJC) – Representative Eliot Engel, the senior Democratic member on the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, will be appointed the new chairman of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians (ICJP), an initiative of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), at the meeting of the ICJP Steering Committee in New York City and

By Rabbi Ben Kamin ENCINITAS, California — In director Steve McQueen’s haunting movie, “12 Years A Slave,” the kidnapped black protagonist, during one long grueling and painfully allegorical segment, is shown hanging from a tree with a noose choking his neck and one foot desperately tapping the muddy ground for balance and life. The spiritual

  By Rabbi Ben Kamin ENCINITAS, California — A letter to President John F. Kennedy. Dear Mr. President, You are so omnipresent, fifty years after Dallas, so vividly alive for those of us who have any memory of you while you were here with us, that it doesn’t seem all that preposterous to send you

By Rabbi Ben Kamin ENCINITAS, California — Like anybody else old enough, I remember when President John F. Kennedy was slain, fifty years ago this Friday. Our tiny Hebrew day school suddenly sent us home just before two o’clock—exactly when we would have concluded our day with the weekly, all-classes welcoming of Sabbath. There would

By Rabbi Ben Kamin ENCINITAS, California — God help our Veterans. Yes, this is the day originally termed “Armistice Day,” November 11, 1918—when the Great War (World War I) ended. Many saw that horrifically bloody conflict (The United States entered in the final year, 1917, but our “doughboys” were bludgeoned in ditches like the Europeans

By Rabbi Ben Kamin ENCINITAS, California — On November 4, 1963, a still-emerging quartet from Liverpool played a key engagement: The Beatles gave a concert for the Royal Family in London. In fact, the event was a Royal Command Performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London, in the presence of both the Queen