Take Back the Mikveh: The Need to Democratize Orthodox Judaism

By Amram Altzman October 28, 2014

This summer, I had the opportunity to do something that few other men my age do: immerse in the mikveh. Normally, my Jewish  rituals are public: I don my kippah wherever I go, I generally pray every morning with my tallit and tefillin in the presence of at least ten other people, and I light…

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Let’s Talk About How We Talk About Orthodoxy

By Amram Altzman October 6, 2014

“Orthodoxy’s greatest innovation was its decision to stop innovating.” These were the words of a friend of mine in high school, a non-Orthodox student at my Modern Orthodox high school, voicing his frustration at Orthodoxy’s seeming inability to develop and adapt to (post-)modern values. When I published my last article, one of the largest criticisms…

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When Will Orthodoxy be Ready for Me?

By Amram Altzman September 16, 2014

  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…

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Reflections of a Day School Graduate, One Year Out

By Amram Altzman May 26, 2014

  I’ve written before on my day school education and its different aspects, critiquing how it taught me (or perhaps should have taught me) to look at my history and my past; I’ve also offered what can perhaps be best described as a back-handed compliment to my Jewish education. Now, as someone who has been…

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Stopping Orthodox Erasure

By Amram Altzman April 14, 2014

Dear Jew in the City:   I understand what you’re trying to do on BuzzFeed with your articles about trying to normalize Orthodox Judaism. You are trying to show that, no, those of us who were raised in the Orthodox world (or are Orthodox now) do not actually have to be that different from you…

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Heresy! (?)

By Amram Altzman April 7, 2014

Heresy warning: I’m not sure I believe in God. Or, at the very least, if I believe in God, I do not believe in God as He Who Dwells on a Throne and Smites You When You Sin, as I was taught as a child. When I pray, I do so not necessarily out of…

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Learning From Ari Shavit’s ‘My Promised Land’

By Alex E. Lipton March 27, 2014

  I My stepfather always told me that all the best books have maps.  So when I opened Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel a map was the first thing I looked for.  I found it on the first page of the book, just after the title page and the…

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Hart Levine Brings Grassroots Judaism to Campus with the Heart to Heart Project

By H. B. Rubin March 13, 2014

It all started with Chanukkah caroling. Late one night, in the midst of finals week stress, a few male Modern Orthodox University of Pennsylvania students decided to carol some Channukah songs at the doors of their Jewish friends. As they walked down the hallway, snapping their fingers and singing in a loud messy harmony, they…

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Modern Orthodoxy’s Identity Crisis

By Amram Altzman March 3, 2014

Modern Orthodoxy has a problem and a blessing: it is the belief that one can be both Modern and Orthodox. The problem is that when one changes, the other must, too, for if we are truly to be both Modern and Orthodox, then as modern world changes, our Orthodoxy must change, too. And that must…

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In Defense of Labels

By Amram Altzman February 24, 2014

I recently published my first op-ed in the Jewish Press. In it, I made the claim — contrary to the beliefs of the far-right wing publication —that those of us who were raised in the left-wing Modern Orthodox world  are not, actually lost to secularism, but are instead, re-imagining the world of traditionally observant Judaism…

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In Search of True Egalitarianism

By Amram Altzman January 27, 2014

  Growing up in the early 2000’s means I watched copious amounts of Arthur, Cyberchase, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!; I knew the dance to “Soulja Boy,” played on my Gameboy obsessively, and ate Go-gurts (or the kosher equivalents thereof) on the school bus ride home. Growing up in the 2000’s also meant that I saw men…

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Uniting Against the Rabbinate: A Call for Pluralism in American Jewry

By Amram Altzman January 20, 2014

  Just a few days after my blog post from last week ran, the Israeli rabbinate decided that it would, indeed, accept Rabbi Avi Weiss’ testimony as legitimate for people he vouched for as Jewish. This is a step in the right direction for the Israeli rabbinate, which had previously called Rabbi Weiss’ validity into…

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On Non-Binary Jewish Identities and the Future of Traditional Judaism

By Amram Altzman January 6, 2014

I have a hard time answering the question, “So how do you identify? Like, Jewish-ly?” On the one hand, I grew up in a Modern Orthodox home and attended Modern Orthodox schools since kindergarten, but, for most of my life so far, was part of a haredi community in southern Brooklyn. On the other hand,…

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Let’s Queer the Jewish Legal Tradition

By Amram Altzman December 16, 2013

I had the honor of speaking at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance’s Voices of Change conference last week, where I, only for a day, became a high school student once again and spoke on a panel about navigating relationships and sexuality in high school as a feminist. While speaking, the topic of Shemirut Negi’ah, or…

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Queering the Liturgy: To Adjust or to Search?

By Jonathan Katz December 12, 2013

It is a problem that I and many other queer Jewish students face: as religious folk, we want to pray. But how do we – gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans*, queer, and other identities across the “rainbow ” – connect with a liturgy that is often seen as heteronormative, cis-normative, and well, “straight”? Some say, “the…

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