Winners named to American Jewish Hall of Fame. After more than 209,000 votes from around the world, 18 men and women have been chosen for the new National Museum of American Jewish History’s Hall of Fame. Based on the poll results and input from historians, the winners ranged from celebrities, such as Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg, to more Judaism-specific figures, including Rabbis Mordecai Kaplan and Isaac Mayer Wise, who founded the Reconstructionist and Reform movements, respectively. The other honorees include musicians Irving Berlin and Leonard Bernstein; Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis; physicist Albert Einstein; baseball pitcher Sandy Koufax; cosmetics entrepreneur and philanthropist Estee Lauder; activist poet Emma Lazarus; Bible translator Rabbi Isaac Leeser; Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir; polio vaccine inventor Jonas Salk; labor leader Rose Schneiderman; Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer; Hasidic Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson; and Zionist women’s leader Henrietta Szold. Finalists who didn’t make the initial cut included poet Allen Ginsberg; Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; entertainer Bette Midler; choreographer Jerome Robbins; and The Three Stooges.
Meatpackers erred in firing Muslims, commission says. A meatpacking company was wrong to fire more than 200 Muslim employees who walked off the job to protest insufficient breaks during Ramadan last year, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Workers at the JBS Swift & Co. plants in Greeley, Colo., and Grand Island, Neb., had wanted their breaks rescheduled to sunset during the Islamic month of daytime fasting, in order to pray and eat. JBS Swift officials said the company amended its policies to accommodate its Muslim employees — mostly Somali immigrants — during this year’s Ramadan observance. The EEOC ruling may result in the commission or the fired workers suing JBS Swift if a settlement is not reached.
Compiled from Religion News Service