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RAC-NJ is working with lead partner Fair Share Housing Center on this racial and economic justice legislative campaign. This is a campaign to help push the "Fair Chance in Housing Act" (S250/A1919) over the finish line. The Act will help to reduce recidivism for New Jersey residents by making safe and secure housing more accessible. At a 12:1 rate for adults, New Jersey has the highest black/white disparity for rates of incarceration in the country, which makes this legislation a racial justice issue. Working together, our 45 New Jersey Reform congregations can put our values into action by partnering with Fair Share Housing Center to make a difference for justice in the Garden State.

Register to join RAC-NJ, the bill's primary sponsor in the NJ State Senate, Sen. Troy Singleton, and Fair Share Housing Center on Thursday, May 6, at 7:30 p.m. ET for RAC-NJ's 2021 issue campaign kickoff.

Former diplomat and Cambridge-educated historian Pam Jenoff has become a mainstay at the top of historical fiction lists. Join us as she discusses her latest will-be blockbuster, The Woman with the Blue Star.

1942. Sadie Gault is eighteen and living with her parents amidst the horrors of the Krakow Ghetto during World War II. When the Nazis liquidate the ghetto, Sadie and her pregnant mother are forced to seek refuge in the perilous sewers beneath the city. One day Sadie looks up through a grate and sees a girl about her own age buying flowers.

Ella Stepanek is an affluent Polish girl living a life of relative ease with her stepmother, who has developed close alliances with the occupying Germans. Scorned by her friends and longing for her fiancé who has gone off to war, Ella wanders Krakow restlessly. While on an errand in the market, she catches a glimpse of something moving beneath a grate in the street. Upon closer inspection, she realizes it's a girl hiding. Ella begins to aid Sadie and the two become close, but as the dangers of the war worsen, their lives are set on a collision course that will test them in the face of overwhelming odds.

As with all her books, Jenoff took a small, little-known nugget from history and created a gripping and powerful story of survival against unimaginable odds. Inspired by the harrowing true stories of people who hid in the sewers beneath the streets of Europe in order to escape the Nazis, Jenoff blends vivid historical detail with a riveting and emotional story, shedding new light on this dark time in history.

Of the legions of stories of World War II and the Holocaust that shape our understanding of those history-changing events, one of the most extraordinary has remained hidden until now: the daring resistance efforts of Jewish women in the ghettos of the Nazi occupation. In The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, Judy Batalion shares the acts of defiance and rebellion of women who saw and acknowledged the truth of their time, worked together, and risked their lives in the fight for justice and liberty. The Light of Days is a meticulously researched and grippingly told David-and-Goliath history that sheds light on the invaluable role these unsung heroines played in fighting against and surviving Hitler's Final Solution.

Batalion first learned of the "ghetto girls" and their achievements when she stumbled upon a Yiddish-language memoir in the British Library more than a decade ago. Delving deeply into myriad Jewish archives and making numerous research trips to Poland and Israel, she painstakingly uncovered their stories through long-overlooked memoirs as well as other surviving documents and personal interviews with their families. The rebellious acts Batalion discovered ran the gamut from spontaneous, simple acts of defiance to complex, planned initiatives. The ghetto girls tricked the Gestapo into carrying their luggage filled with contraband, hid revolvers in teddy bears, flung Molotov cocktails, and bombed German train lines. They flirted with Nazis; bought them off with wine, whiskey, and pastry; and then shot and killed them.

Batalion shares the hope and daring of these remarkable women, focusing on Renia Kukielka, a young Jewish woman who disguised herself as a Catholic girl and broke through ghetto borders with weapons and cash strapped to her torso. She smuggled sick youth, planned rescue operations, and masterminded her own escape from a Gestapo prison. She lived to 90, known by friends and family for her sense of humor, her love of fashion, and her kindness.

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