Community Culture

Several years ago, Lissie Rappaport Schifman was sitting at the High Holidays service at Temple Israel, pregnant and between jobs. She started thinking. Thinking about where she was going to now devote her energy. Thinking about what kind of world she was bringing her child into. Thinking about the current geopolitical climate, our dependence on foreign oil, and the global warming crisis-all of the ecological concerns that many people share. And she looked upward and found inspiration in the roof. To Schifman, the roof was a place to begin. MORE »

Does a deal on aluminum siding advance the cause of equality? It’s a fair question given the vast amount of corporate marketing present at Twin Cities Pride last weekend. As LGBT people and their friends and family gathered to celebrate community and identity, many event-goers are left wondering when that celebration stopped being about queer rights and became a mass marketing event for the Fortune 500. MORE »

Kimloan Thi Nguyen, 22, of Burnsville, recently won a pair of 1st places in both the International Chinese Folk Instrument Competition and the International Dance Competition at the 2008 CPAA International Multi-Arts Festival held at the Montgomery Theater in San Jose on June 1st. Nguyen is pictured above with her trophies. MORE »

“I remember being numb. All my emotions were gone—I was in a survival mode.”

The twenty-four-year-old Rwandan genocide survivor recalled the past, with a blank look on her face, watching the steam rise from her cup of hot chocolate.

“We knew it was coming,” said Alice Tuza, now a refugee living in the Twin Cities. “We just did not know when.” MORE »