Archive
And you thought Commentary Magazine would be J Street’s biggest critic. Think again. A group of pro-Greater Israel nationalists has taken it upon themselves to create Z Street, a right-wing organization formed to combat the “great danger to the Jewish State of Israel and, increasingly, to world Jewry,” according to the group’s charter. Z Street […]
From the start of my home-stay in Amman, I made it clear that I was a practicing and self identifying Jew. I felt that this was an important first step in building an open relationship with my host family, as well as in exploring how my sense of identity could co-exist within an Arab household. […]
In his blog post from June 18, Aryeh Roskies wrote that in Israel “it is possible to construct a concrete secular Jewish identity.†His column focused on the struggle of preserving an authentic and vibrant Jewish culture in the absence of religious uniformity, and he mentioned Israel only to contrast the Israeli Jewish community with […]
It’s hard to look. The Boston Globe’s photo blog, The Big Picture, advertises itself as “news stories in photographs.” The photojournalism is breathaking. The images are sharp and focused. They tell a story, and often, quite a moving one. But bear in mind that photojournalism is tricky, and it takes a few moments to discern […]
It would have been nice if, in honor of July 4th, U. S. Independence Day, I wrote a sweeping, lyrical tribute to my American Jewish heritage. But as hard as I tried to come up with something awe-inspiring – combing through anecdotes about the Alamo and the text of “New Colossus†– I kept coming […]
Last week, the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva high school where I teach marked the end of the year with a siyum, a celebration in honor of the completion of a tractate of the Talmud. Almost every male there wore a black hat, but I wore a crocheted kippah. It was clear that they were ultra-Orthodox and that […]
Yesterday, the Forward published this article on restitution for property confiscated from Jews by the Nazis and the Soviet Union. “In a significant gesture this week, 46 countries signed a declaration at the close of a Holocaust Era Assets Conference in Prague aimed at easing the restitution process for Jewish property taken during the Nazi […]
Congratulations, Judaism! Reality TV has chosen you to teach the most spoiled, hostile, and disrespectful teenagers a lesson. According to a recent article in Haaretz, BBC’s “The World’s Strictest Parents” recently filmed an episode in the Orthodox-only Israeli village of Nof Ayalon to see whether two teenage high school dropouts, Jack Travers and Gemma Lyons, […]
The Death of the Jewish Cultural Vanguard
I was about to write a blog post about a giant Israeli cucumber, but then I decided to check my email. And what happens? First I see a JTA piece by Ben Harris about Jewish Hipsters, then I read a Tablet article by Wesley Yang about how Jews invented Rock n’ Roll. Yang’s argument channels […]