A Progressive, Secular Voice

A Jewish agricultural colony named Carmel was established on this date in 1891 in New Jersey by Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association of Paris. By 1900, eighty-nine Jewish families lived there, with nineteen surviving exclusively through farming. The first such Jewish agricultural settlement in America had been established in Warwasing, New York in [...]

Women’s Equality Day was established by Congress on this date in 1971, thanks to the activism of Representative Bella Abzug (see http://jewishcurrents.org/jewdayo/july-24-bella-abzug-2257). Women’s Equality Day commemorates passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution on August 26, 1920, establishing women’s long-delayed right to vote. Fifty years later, on August 26, 1970, Betty Friedan led the [...]

As the bubonic plague continued to rip its way across the Rhineland, some six thousand Jews were killed in Mainz, Germany on this date in 1349, based on accusations that they had poisoned the city’s drinking water. (See http://jewishcurrents.org/jewdayo/february-13-black-death-696/.) In self-defense, the Jewish community killed two hundred of their attackers. Mainz was an important [...]

Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the “Maharal” of Prague, died on this date in 1609. Legend and literature credit him with constructing and animating the Golem in order to protect and serve the Jewish community. Rabbi Loew (the name means “lion”) was the Chief Rabbi of Prague, Moravia and Poland, and an interpreter [...]