The “Halakhically Curious” Phenomenon
Jewish law has often problematically been taught as a set of dogmatic rules, but a new generation of Jews and Jewish educators are calling for a more intentional vision of halakha.
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Jewish law has often problematically been taught as a set of dogmatic rules, but a new generation of Jews and Jewish educators are calling for a more intentional vision of halakha.
Millennials, we get a bad rap for a lot of things – many of them undeserved. We know the stereotypes: We’re self-obsessed, we’ve ruined the English language with our lol-worthy emojis and text speech, and we demand intellectual baby blankets in the form of political correctness. Basically, if there’s a venerated institution out there, someone…
Does a kosher bakery have the right to refuse to bake a wedding cake for an intermarried couple? If the bakery is in Indiana, the answer might be yes. Indiana’s passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in March caused an uproar, especially among LGBTQ rights activists, who argued that it could encourage discrimination…
In high school, my friends and I dubbed our childhood neighborhood “The Shtetl.” Though we didn’t boast Yiddish names or a pushy matchmaker, like in the shtetls our grandparents grew up in, our shtetl, with its disproportionately high concentration of Jews, nevertheless rivaled its prior European counterparts in its sense of community and strong commitment…
Deuteronomy 24:1 states, “If a man takes a wife and possesses her and she fails to please him because he finds something obnoxious about her, he writes her a Bill of Divorcement, hands it to her and sends her away from his house.” Based on this verse of the Torah, the entire decision to divorce…
I’ve written about the successes and shortcomings of my fourteen years of Modern Orthodox day school education before, from religious, secular, and Zionist perspectives. I’ve also written about the thought processes behind my decisions to leave the Modern Orthodox world and join — at least for now — egalitarian communities that fall more in…
A storied community in a room. Hand-written notes, wedding documents, and Mezuzahs piled everywhere. When Oren Kosansky discovered these items and more in bags and boxes in a small room in the old synagogue of Rabat, Morocco as a Fulbright Scholar in 2005, they would change his life and the lives of his future students…
In this week’s Torah portion, Naso, we receive two new laws. First, is the law of Sotah, a process in which women accused of adultery are given a special water that will prove whether they are innocent or guilty, then the Nazirite, someone who has taken a special oath to not drink alcohol, cut…
“You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” Parashat Kedoshim begins with this powerful command, telling us to be holy because God is holy. It pushes us, giving us an expectation that we just can’t work our way around. We aren’t commanded to be holy because it will extend our lives,…
Throughout the last few weekly readings, things have been going quite well for the Hebrew tribes—nothing bad has really happened and everyone is excited to have the Tabernacle up and running. This week in Parashat Shmini, still on the high of the last few weeks, we move to the last day of sacrifices, with the…