I was inspecting the backyard crops when I stopped to take in my surroundings; not just the greenery, but also the call and response by various species of birds and the voices of the neighbors’ children playing outside, while trying to ignore the whine from the highway a mile away…

There are subjects I know enough about to be conversant at a cocktail party and there are subjects I know enough about to keep silent. Art, for example. We recently toured Expo Chicago, an international exposition of contemporary and modern art that filled the 170,000-square-foot exhibition hall at Navy Pier…

I was interviewed recently for a British podcast that promotes political and media literacy, primarily for students and young adults in the United Kingdom. In the course of that conversation, which focused on antisemitism in America, I was asked how news coverage has changed over the course of my professional…

Within days of taking up her post as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Ambassador Michèle Taylor joined a walkout when Russia’s foreign minister defended his nation’s invasion of Ukraine. Not two weeks earlier, on Feb. 17, the Jewish Atlantan nominated by President Joe Biden…

The gavel came down, “sine die” — a Latin phrase that lawmakers translate as “we’re out of here” — was declared and, early on April 5, the frenetic final day of the Georgia General Assembly session came to an end. An unexpected setback for Atlanta’s major Jewish organizations was the…

The statement atop Bev Saltzman Lewyn’s Facebook page reads: “Don’t kvetch. Create something better instead.” Lewyn is receiving treatment for acute lymphocytic leukemia at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, in her hometown of Houston. Some days, she undergoes multiple rounds of chemotherapy, even while sleeping. “With this intense chemo you…

When I watch documentaries about the 1960s civil rights movement, I take note of the children. Today they may have grandchildren the same age that they were then. I wonder what stories these elders tell. The FRONTLINE series “American Reckoning” recently focused on the 1967 killing of Wharlest Jackson Sr…

Abby Shashoua is the owner of The Fine Print Bakery, working from her home in Cumming. Ken Katz and Jeannette Flores-Katz are the proprietors of La Bodega at the MET, a carry-out eatery in the Adair Park neighborhood southwest of downtown Atlanta. Shashoua and the Katzes are among more than…

The Facebook post appeared the day after Russia invaded Ukraine: “Just curious — how many of us with any familial links to Ukraine (like my paternal grandmother’s town of Narodychi) have looked up, say, its distance to Kyiv?” Within days, more than 80 people, among them numerous Jewish Atlantans, had…