Archive
Yup. You know all that debt you’re getting into paying your tuition? You better just drop out now, says presidential candidate Rick Santorum. Not really, but pretty close. Santorum, who has a BA, an MBA and JD, criticized President Barack Obama for saying in the State of the Union that everybody should go to college, […]
Up close and personal in the Gaza Strip [Vice News] After a failed attempt in 2007 to make it into Gaza, during a violent conflict there, Vice News finally makes it in, sharing their insights and experiences on one of the most hotly debated geographic regions on Earth. Licking the Lubavitcher Rebbe…? [Jerusalem Post] A […]
Students for Justice in Palestine members at American University protested the administrative detention of Khader Adnan, who was arrested last December by Israeli police forces, by going on their own hunger strike for five days. Israel believes he is an Islamic Jihad terrorist, but has been unable to produce any evidence. Authorities never formally charged […]
I’ve reached a point in my personal musings on Modern Orthodoxy that I’ve started to wonder whether such a thing is even possible: the merging of modern life and religious Judaism. Is Modern Orthodoxy a contradiction in terms? The Modern Orthodoxy ideal is living and engaging in the modern world while maintaining a lifestyle committed […]
I’ve got two items of note on the Israeli Apartheid Week front today: Tablet Magazine has a nice selection of opinions on how to deal with IAW And Brits throwing water balloons. I’ll leave the water balloons aside for a minute and focus on the Tablet piece, which brings together a variety of people all combating IAW in their own […]
Facebook is a source of endless procrastination for college students, a place for middle schoolers to explore their burgeoning sexuality via pictures taken in mirror reflects, and occasionally, a place for political and social activism. This is one of the latter stories. As Rabbi Jason Miller commented in this Jewish Week blog post, Facebook is […]
Training to be a Jew [Tablet] Jake Kohlman, a Jewish soldier in the American armed forces, reflects on how his basic training enabled him to connect to his religion. “At that Sunday service, for the first time, I started to understand. The chaplain’s words lifted my spirits. I remembered why I had joined in the […]
Rabbi Mordechai Rackover, the Jewish chaplain of Brown University and the rabbi at Brown-RISD Hillel (which serves both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design), doesn’t quite fit the popular conception of Orthodox Jews as out of touch with the modern world. He’s rarely found without his iPhone (except on Shabbat, of course), maintains a Kosher food blog, and is an almost alarmingly prolific tweeter. By any measure, he is as deeply involved in both modern American and Orthodox life as anyone can be. So what led him to strongly decry a recent statement by a group of Orthodox rabbis that condemned gay marriage, though he agrees with them that it is “halachically impossible”?
There is a God, after 30 years and 17 nominations, Meryl Streep has won another Oscar. I say this because she is by far the finest actress of our time and yet every Oscar season it is a debate whether she will win the Oscar she easily deserves. This was a surprise considering her competition, […]
Israeli Apartheid Week began on Sunday. But some pro-Israel protesters at the University of California, Berkeley got started a day early, pepper spraying some folks on Saturday. Not to be outdone, a group of anti-Israel students mic-checked a speaker at the University of New Mexico on Thursday (see above video). On Thursday, protesters interrupted a […]