Health and Safety

In April 2015, when I was 15 years old, I learned that my grandfather had taken his own life after fighting with anxiety and depression for many years.

As a follow-up to last month’s March for Our Lives, Reform Jewish young people have designated April 10^th as a National Call-In Day for Gun Violence Prevention.

April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month, and – in honor of the one million people living with Parkinson’s disease in the United States – I want to share my story.

At this Passover season, our children – the wise ones, the motivated ones, the angry ones, and the fearful ones – are asking us their own four questions.

When our JCC received a bomb threat on Monday morning, suddenly, the front desk staff didn’t seem tough enough for the real world.

In his first book, Melanoma: It Started with a Freckle, Jewish author David L. Stanley tells the story of his battle with melanoma. His humor comes through – yet he never minimizes the seriousness of this frightening disease. Stanley, a science teacher, is the son of a physician and the husband of a nurse, and he writes about the intricacies of human anatomy and biology in an understandable, engaging way. His descriptions of the interplay of skin muscles, capillaries, arteries and nerves are as engrossing as his description of his emotional state upon learning of the dreaded diagnosis of what he calls the “rat bastard” cancer.

In the days before Roe v. Wade declared abortion a constitutional right, the symbol of women’s underground, dangerous – and persistent – efforts to obtain abortions was the simple wire coat hanger. Despite the constitutional protections in place since 1973, this gruesome symbol has recently made a troubling return to our discourse on reproductive justice.