A debate over Israel is roiling New York’s gay and lesbian community. Days after barring a talk by gay scholar Sarah Schulman about her new book that criticizes Israel, a leading New York gay community center effectively reversed its decision amid heavy protest and allowed the event to go forward. Prominent gay elected officials, including…
Recently, I had the pleasure of teaching at Limmud FSU (Former Soviet Union), the version of the wildly successful international learning conference geared toward Russian-speaking Jews. Held at a hotel outside Princeton University, the conference’s theme was science, with an emphasis on Albert Einstein, and the cultural and political sessions reflected the generally rational, secular…
‘Reparative therapy” for gays and lesbians, which attempts to “change” sexual orientation and is neither reparative nor therapy, is the last gasp of bad theology. It exists to solve a theological crisis. On the one hand, Jews are told that God loves us and that “it is not good… to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) On…
‘It is evil for Christians to try to convert Jews with this dreck. Why don’t you people leave us in peace?” So wrote one Amazon reviewer of the new “Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford University Press, 2011), a magisterial volume of Jewish commentaries, essays and scholarly notes on the second half of the Christian Bible….
Jewish conservatives continue to spend significant amounts of effort and money to swing American and Israeli politics to the far right. Most visible is gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson, whose funding of Israeli media affected the 2009 Israeli election and who is now spending a fortune to equate American “support for Israel” with support for Israel’s…
How many wake-up calls do we need? The spate of communal misogyny in Israel and the United States, carried out under the pretext of a religious mandate, yet unjustified even by ultra-Orthodox interpretations of Halacha; Haredi America’s wall of silence about sexual abuse; and a variety of other scandals in the Haredi world, such as…
Jewish Book Month has just ended, and I’ve had a wonderful time crisscrossing the country on my book tour. At almost every event, there are people in the audience with tears in their eyes, and parents who come up to tell me how the book I’ve written is enabling them to be closer to their…
Most religious affirmations of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have been “negative” ones: They argue that Leviticus (and Romans and Corinthians) doesn’t really prohibit homosexuality, or that ancient prohibitions should be set aside in the age of the iPad. But isn’t there a “positive” case, as well — that biblical religious values support the…
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