A white rabbi and black minister (this isn’t the start of a joke) link arms and are swept up in the sound of a gospel song. Not only the two clergymen. As the song soars, an entire congregation is on its feet in this Orthodox house of prayer and the congregants are trying to overcome…
If you have plans tonight, cancel them. Instead, sit down in front of your TV to watch “MAKERS: Women Who Make America” on PBS at 8:00 PM EST. (Check local listings if you live in other time zones.) Otherwise, you will miss a remarkable three-hour journey through 50 years of the women’s movement. Even for…
Aviva Braun, a social worker and psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders in young women, and Rabba Sara Hurwitz, a pioneering Modern Orthodox spiritual leader at New York’s Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and Yeshivat Maharat, are teaming up for an event that will focus on body image from feminist, therapeutic and Torah perspectives. The event —…
I am one of those retrospective people who loves to reflect and analyze the events of the past 12 months at the end of each calendar year. So this weekend, while snowed in at my parents’ home in western Massachusetts, I set out to answer this: What were the top 10 moments for Jewish women…
A new debate looms over what to call Orthodox Jewish women trained in rabbinic texts and serving the Jewish community as religious leaders. And the ‘R’ word has once again reared its disruptive head. Yeshivat Maharat, the institution that is training women to work as Orthodox religious leaders, has formed its first advisory board and…
As executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, Erin Saiz Hanna is front and center in the fight for women’s ordination in the Catholic Church. It’s been an uphill battle; just last week, Church officials warned that ordaining women as priests was as serious an offense as sex abuse. Founded in 1975, the Women’s Ordination…
Abigail Pogrebin’s story, “The Rabbi and the Rabba,” in this week’s New York magazine, takes an insightful look at the man behind the making of the first woman in America to be ordained as Orthodox clergy, Rabbi Avi Weiss. Pogrebin does a good job of capturing many aspects of Weiss’ complicated personality; his ardent political…
The recent Rabbinical Council of America decision to exclude women from the rabbinate brought to mind the 2004 film “Mekudeshet: Sentenced to Marriage,” a documentary about women stuck in the divorce process in Israel. There is one particularly heart-wrenching scene that has been playing over in my mind recently. “Rachel,” a 30-something Orthodox mother of…
100% of profits support our journalism
