American Jews or Jewish Americans?

By rebeccablady July 23, 2009

So there are answers to the “Where is God?” question after all. I’d like to respond to a couple of comments that appeared on my last post that both validated my observation of God’s absence but provided different reasons for it. Benjamin Siegel’s main claim was that “God is nothing more than a very compelling…

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Scammed by a Jew during the Three Weeks

By Ben Sales July 21, 2009

An Israeli stole $300 from me yesterday. Said Israeli, whose name–I have since learned–is not Avi Levi, played me for the cash under the pretense of needing medicine money for his sick 10-year old daughter, who had flo4from Israel to Maryland for kidney surgery the day before. He needed the medicine before flying back, he…

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Remembering Dr. Atomic

By peil July 16, 2009

Today marks the 64th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test at Trinity, a desert site sixty miles west of Alamogordo, New Mexico. Conducted in the early morning of July 16, 1945, the “gadget” was a success: producing a “burst of light of a brilliance beyond any comparison” and laying the groundwork for the U.S.’s…

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Kids these days…

By rebeccablady July 14, 2009

It’s a personal relief to see so many Jewish innovators and new Jewish organizations really giving a lot of thought to the Jewish experience, which is something I feel was left out too often in my Jewish day school and Young Israel synagogue experience. But I’m confused about one thing: Where is God? The question…

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Z Street: this is for real

By Ben Sales July 14, 2009

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…

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From East of the Bank: Christain, Notzrim, Missihi

By miriamberger July 14, 2009

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….

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Military and Society in Israel

By admin July 12, 2009

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…

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Taking Jewish Guilt Global

By Ben Sales July 9, 2009

Where does our moral responsibility end? That was the question I confronted at Campus Progress‘s national conference yesterday in Washington, DC. Campus Progress, a division of the liberal flagship Center for American Progress, is a group dedicated to bringing the concerns of college students to the fore of the US political discourse. Think of it…

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Worth a thousand words? You decide.

By rebeccablady July 6, 2009

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…

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Born on the 4th of July (Bris scheduled for the 12th)

By peil July 3, 2009

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…

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Nostalgia and Identity

By admin July 3, 2009

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…

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The Death of the Jewish Cultural Vanguard

By Ben Sales July 2, 2009

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…

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Serving Justice, or Just Serving Jews

By thellmann July 1, 2009

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…

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By rebeccablady June 30, 2009

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,…

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From East of the Bank: Meat, Basar, Lahem

By miriamberger June 30, 2009

I have found that I lack the necessary Arabic words to adequately describe the concept of “keeping kosher.” While the notion of vegetarianism may be generally accepted in Amman, for my home-stay mother, Madame Basma, such a lifestyle remains as foreign… as the American Jew living in her house. I had barely walked through the…

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