When Ilana Mills was 16 years old she had an epiphany: "I want to be a rabbi."
At first she worried the only reason she wanted to follow that career path was because her two older sisters had talked about becoming rabbis. "I had to figure it out for myself and make sure I was doing it for all the right reasons," she says.
So, Mills went to college, but didn't take Hebrew, because "I wasn't going to become a rabbi," and became a religious-studies major at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. "I fell in love with Jewish philosophy," she says.
Arizona's new congressional district has opened up a sort of primary free-for-all in both major political parties, with no fewer than five candidates on the Republican side and three on the Democrat side, according to data from the Federal Election Commission.
Rather unusually in Arizona, the District 9 primary race on the Democrat side features two Jewish candidates: Andrei Cherny, who ran unsuccessfully for state treasurer in 2010 and served as his party's state chairman in 2011 before becoming a candidate in this race; and David Schapira, the minority leader in the Arizona Senate. The third candidate, Kyrsten Sinema, was an Arizona state senator before resigning Jan. 3 to run for this office. (Jewish News is focusing on the Democrats' race because of the Jewish candidates. The GOP primary involving Vernon Parker, Travis Grantham, Wendy Rogers, Martin Sepulveda and Leah Campos Schandlbauer will be covered in Jewish News Voter's Guide to the primary elections, to be published July 27.)
In the months since the Jewish Community Conversation brought nearly 350 people together at Arizona State University to discuss the future of the Valley's Jewish community, three topics have emerged as candidates for future development: arts and culture, leadership and public affairs.
"Those selected to move forward are not necessarily the most important ones," but are the ones that can gain traction, said Stu Turgel, president of the Jewish Community Foundation, the agency that presented the event in partnership with 46 local Jewish communal organizations on Sept. 11, 2011.
In late February, JCF met with 40 chief professional officers and board leaders of local Jewish communal agencies and organizations to discuss the results of the conversation (a report is posted on JCF's website, jcfphoenix.org). At this meeting, these community leaders indicated which of the nine topic areas discussed at the Sept. 11 event that they were most interested in pursuing. Out of these nine topic areas, three were selected to proceed further into work groups.
