Pro-Israel marchers walk along Fifth Avenue on May 5, 2002 in New York City. / Getty Images While Americans continue to hold long-time allies like Great Britain and Canada in high esteem, they are pretty divided as to how they feel about some of the government’s other key allies — like Israel. A recently published…
This past year saw the inaugural graduation in June of Yeshivat Maharat, the Bronx yeshiva that has been controversially training women to lead Orthodox congregations. Three new maharats emerged from the school this year. Then in the fall came the high profile installation of Rabbi Asher Lopatin as the new president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah,…
A top Conservative movement official thinks that Conservative rabbis should be allowed to participate in interfaith weddings. Now explicitly barred by the movement, the proposal — put forward by Rabbi Charles Simon of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs — is one of a handful of new efforts by Conservative rabbis to loosen restrictions on…
As the gnashing of teeth about the fate of American Jewry in the wake of the Pew Research Center survey continues, a newer and far more troublesome study of European Jewry ought to keep the supposed problem of defining Jewishness by the food you eat and the jokes you tell in some sort of perspective….
On November 18, French President François Hollande spoke in Israel’s Knesset and showered praise on Israel and on the Jewish people in general. He also made special mention of the French expatriate community in Israel, and assured his audiences — in France as well as in Israel — that he would “not rest in fighting…
As a first-year rabbinical student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), I read a lot about the challenges facing “millennials.” With the recent outpouring of analysis relating to the Pew report on American Jewry, the amount of content may have quadrupled, but the number of young voices has not. I’m often frustrated…
I gave my 10-year-old son, Zev, the Pew survey on American Jews. The entire thing. One Sunday afternoon at our kitchen table. It all started the night before, when an undergraduate student at Hillel at Ohio University, where I am a rabbi, told my son during our Sabbath dinner that he recently found out he…
A line in Michah Gottlieb’s heartfelt cri de coeur about why he left Conservative Judaism for Orthodoxy jumped out at me. In a column published two weeks ago in the Forward, the New York University professor described his gradual disenchantment with the lackluster observance and intellectual dishonesty of the Conservative movement of his youth. Chief…
100% of profits support our journalism
