Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Ha’aretz’s opinion page says religion is bad. The recent furor over a declaration issued by several Israeli rabbis, headed by the chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, urging Jewish residents not to rent apartments to Arabs, has been heated in all quarters. The primary angle taken by the Ha’aretz opinion page is that this shows…
The Rabbinical Council of America, the largest organization of Modern Orthodox American rabbis, recently released a controversial paper regarding the halakhic status of organ donation. The involved and controversial topic has been, for the past week, the subject of much debate. At stake is the basic question of whether modern orthodox Jews should be allowed…
Different people celebrate different aspects of Chanukkah. In liberal and progressive circles, people tend to emphasize the general theme of political and religious freedom that the Maccabees embodied, in light of the fact that they fought for the right to practice their religion. In more traditional and orthodox circles, however, one often hears the theme…
I was recently forwarded a Youtube video that was made from the program that lets you create cartoons by simply typing dialogue. It is very entertaining and worth a watch, but for those who don’t have time, or have difficulty bending their ears around the computerized reproduction of ashkenazic pronunciations of Jewish legal and exegetical…
The day before this past Yom Kippur (oh, fine, literally minutes before this past Yom Kippur) I wrote a post on this blog mentioning some of the religious writing of the 18th century decidedly non-Jewish philosopher Immanuel Kant, and I noted that his outlook on sin and repentance is kind of depressing. In a nutshell,…
A common phrase that used to be heard in Campus Hillel mission statements was: “To maximize the number of Jews doing Jewish with other Jews.” Yet, as familiar as many of us may be with this formulation, it has today disappeared from nearly all Hillel websites and promotional materials (with a few exceptions). Why? In…
On the first day of the semester, a certain professor of mine unreservedly characterized the great 12th-century Rabbi Moses Maimonides as “the most influential figure in Jewish rabbinic history.” While there certainly might be other contenders for that distinction, the fact that my professor was willing to make that claim is telling. Maimonides’s groundbreaking theological…
Looking at the picture of Hermann Cohen on the cover of his opus Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism, it is a bit difficult to believe that he was a rock star. Not in the sense that he wrote brave contemporary music that spoke to the minds of the people, garnering an…
I never knew before blogging for New Voices just how diverse the opinions expressed in the magazine were. Just take yesterday’s update email, entitled “Fight the Loyalty Oath,” in which no less than three different views by three different authors were expressed on a controversial bit of Israeli legislation. The opinions were: 1) The proposed…
“No, really, please, seriously, explain to me the difference!” The fireworks were flying in a meeting staged last week at Yale Hillel prefacing the search for a new Orthodox campus rabbi. Yale Hillel, like many Hillels across the country, are in a state of change, shifting and adapting to make room for new priorities, and…
We all know that Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was, in his time, a passionate advocate of vegetarianism within a traditional Jewish philosophical framework. But Shmuel Hanagid? Seriously? (Shmuel Hanagid, by the way, was (one of) the 10th-11th century Jewish poet laureate(s) of Muslim Spain. He was also a learned Talmudic scholar, in addition to serving…
The following thought is in part a development of a marvelous sermon given on the “Shabbat of Repentance,” by Rabbi Jonathan Rosenblatt of the Riverdale Jewish Center. All weaknesses are my own. As I write these words, traditional Jews are sitting down at their tables and eating of fine linens for the “seuda mafseket”: the…
Those readers who have been following the daf yomi (“Daily Page” – a popular global Talmud study initiative) will have been having a good time recently. The program is currently working on the middle of Tractate Avodah Zarah, which deals with relationships between Jews and non-Jews generally, but has a lot of other good stuff…