Maimonides is trending these days. The 12th century sage, once confined to musty tomes and talmudic study halls, is being brandished in the opinion pages of The New York Times, cited on the airwaves in “This American Life,” and featured in Dara Horn’s latest novel. By some measures, Maimonides is at the height of his…
Shimon Peres / Getty Images Israel’s President Shimon Peres has just secured his second appearance in the Guinness Book of Records. But he missed an opportunity when setting his new record yesterday. I was excited to watch Peres — who is already in the book as oldest head of state — teach the largest ever…
Day school parents can take heart from Mr. Scrubs. “Wish I Was Here,” Zach Braff’s Kickstarter-funded film, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in late January. Fans — especially the 46,520 who helped pay for it to be made — were eagerly awaiting the “Garden State” follow up. And, exactly a decade after Braff’s first…
A few months into his rabbinical studies in Jerusalem in 2012, it struck Benjamin Ross how little Israelis seemed to know about American Jews like him. At the same time, the second-year Hebrew Union College student was mulling over the fraught, distanced relationships American Jews have with Israelis. “Many Americans have no concept of life…
My name is Ken Gordon, and I don’t belong to a synagogue. When the Pew Research Center reported that two-thirds of American Jews are in the same situation, I didn’t break out into a cold Jewish sweat, as did so many of my colleagues. I thought instead: I’m not alone! My wife and I send…
On a cold spring evening last year, my Jewish literature professor took his Sarah Lawrence College class to a klezmer performance by the band Zion80, a mash-up inspired by the music of Shlomo Carlebach and Fela Kuti. Inside the small, stuffy room at The Stone, a music venue in New York City, I watched students…
(Haaretz) — As a certified sex educator who runs a side business out of her home selling dilators and vibrators to the ultra-Orthodox and secular alike, Beverley Damelin was certain she had seen and heard it all. That includes the case of an elderly ultra-Orthodox woman who recently summoned Damelin to Bnei Brak so she…
(JTA) — For the first 3 1/2 weeks of the summer, one group of 5-year-olds at Ramah Day Camp in Nyack, N.Y., was “very quiet” as the children went about the typical camp activities, according to Amy Skopp Cooper, the camp’s director. But in the fourth week, the talking started – in Israeli-accented Hebrew. By the…
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