Writing by Dr. Dannielle Blumenthal

Summary Mathilda Stroli (née Mandel), my grandmother, was interviewed by the USC Shoah Foundation on April 18, 1999, in Toronto, Canada, regarding her experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Born in Cluj, Romania, on January 22, 1922, Stroli grew up in a very close, strictly Orthodox family; her father, Adolf Mandel, was a serious man and… — read more

Question for Jewish leaders, specifically rabbis today. Why aren’t you speaking up and coming up with solutions for the life cycle of Jewish marriage and divorce? I am no expert. I am not fully Orthodox, but even I know that there are ways to deal with this, not just the marriage contract, in extraordinary situations,… — read more

Reid Hoffman bankrolled E. Jean Carroll’s civil lawsuits against Donald Trump for sexual abuse (she won $5 million) and defamation (she won a staggering $83 million). American Future Republic, a non-profit organization affiliated with Hoffman, disbursed a $7 million payment to Kaplan Hecker & Fink, the litigation law firm representing Carroll. Hoffman and AFR are… — read more

Was The New York Times so eager to promote Hamas propaganda laundered through the respected Nick Kristof that it ignored its own reputational guardrails? See below. This is a formal legal letter sent by the National Jewish Advocacy Center (NJAC) on behalf of the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a shareholder of The… — read more

The first thing to know is this (bold, underline): THESE ARE NOT STUPID PEOPLE. You can be brilliant and brainwashed. I. YES, IT IS A CULT Because these people are locked into a cult, they can’t step back and see the contradiction: How can a religious preacher tell you to disregard the very religion they… — read more

In 2016, someone posted an antisemitic article on LinkedIn called “What’s Good for the Jews Is Bad for America,” or something along those lines. At the time, I worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC. I commented on the post, and another antisemite got into an argument with me. The next thing… — read more

The Madison-Allen-Michelle-David Cheating Scandal: Commentary These 2 couples were a horrible match for one another. Yet MAFS matched them anyway. Was that deliberate, to create drama? Or are they just bad at making matches? Then, on top of it, Madison from the first couple and David from the second couple stepped out of their respective… — read more

Shalom Task Force began in a moment of genuine moral urgency. In 1992, a New York pediatrician kept seeing battered Jewish women and children in his practice—bruised, frightened, and without culturally appropriate resources. Distressed by what he saw, he approached community members, and a group of women banded together to create what became Shalom Task… — read more

Okay, so I want to talk about a couple of things. The first is why so many people are confused about the Raphi Stein issue—or what I’m going to call the Raphi Stein issue. It is really the Kohn vs. Stein divorce, similar to the Lonna Kin case. One of the central issues is a… — read more

For generations, a powerful cultural myth circulated quietly within many Jewish communities: “Jews don’t beat their spouses.” Wrapped in the religious ideal of Shalom Bayit (peace in the home), domestic abuse was often imagined as something that happened elsewhere, in other cultures or dysfunctional secular environments. But survivors, advocates, clinicians, and community organizations have spent… — read more