Way back in February, when my beloved younger brother invited my family to celebrate Passover with his wife and two kids, I politely declined. I couldn’t fathom making the 300-mile drive from San Diego after my husband and I returned from visiting our 20-year-old study abroad daughter in Australia the night before. That was then…
(JTA) — U.S. Jews know more about religion in general than their non-Jewish neighbors, a new survey shows. Americans who are not Jewish, meanwhile, don’t know a lot about Judaism. But they like Jews more than any other religious group. And they think there are more Jews in the country than there actually are. The…
Donald Trump’s vulgar racism is not incidental to his political character. It’s not a latent undercurrent revealed in some unguarded moment, but rather the force through which his political career was launched and continues to perpetuate his hold over the Republican Party. This has been obvious for quite some time, indeed since he announced his…
In an op-ed last week in these pages, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove argued that American Jews focus on Israel as a coping mechanism to distract us from “the endangered condition of our Judaism” caused by assimilation and intermarriage. If we could only allocate our resources to Jewish education and communal institutions and away from the constant…
The great Jewish debates of the 1950s and 1960s revolved around whether the Bible was or was not divine. It wasn’t a new conversation for Jews, but it took on new meaning in the wake of the Holocaust. We weren’t just arguing over whether God wrote the Bible, but over whether God was in Auschwitz,…
Last month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that American aid to Israel is “something that can be discussed” in Washington. Her comments made news precisely because America’s policy of giving Israel billions in aid without expecting any policy changes in return hasn’t actually been discussed — or at least questioned — in either party in more…
Over the past few years, Birthright, the ten-day Jewish roots trip to Israel, has taken something of a beating. Activist groups like If Not Now and J Street U have made a habit of attacking the trip, which has become something of a sacred cow in the Jewish community; these attacks include campaigns criticizing Birthright’s…
The historian Pamela Nadell made a fascinating point in an opinion piece in last week’s Washington Post: By focusing on the Holocaust, she argues, Americans have overlooked centuries of anti-Semitism on our own shores. “This focus on the Holocaust gets Americans off the hook. Anti-Semitism is something that happened over there, in Europe — an…
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