Friday, April 19th 2024 |
By LEONARD FELSON
HARTFORD, CT (JTA) — My wife stared at me as if I were from another planet.
“What do you mean you don’t know if you can come to my cousin’s wedding?” she demanded indignantly.
She hadn’t seen her relatives in years and was looking forward to a weekend getaway with her husband of 28 years without our grown children.
“Well, it’s on a Saturday afternoon, before Shabbat...
By AVI WEISS
NEW YORK (JTA) — Belief in God is at the core of my very being. But that belief is sometimes challenged by the scores of innocents killed over the millennia in God’s name, from biblical times to the present day.
Last month, dozens were killed at a shopping mall in Kenya by terrorists demanding to know if those they were confronting were Muslim. If Muslim, they were...
By EDMON RODMAN
In a mixed-up Jewish calendar year when Chanukah falls on Thanksgiving, did Yom Kippur fall twice? In the first weeks of October, with the government on partial shutdown and the debt clock ticking, we felt that some kind of atonement was coming, that’s for sure.
As a recent Pew study has told us, fewer belong to a synagogue, or even believe that God exists, but who in...
By ANDRES SPOKOINY
NEW YORK (JTA) — Since the release of the Pew report on American Jews, the question I’ve been asked most often is what surprises me about it.
What surprises me most is that anybody is surprised.
The Pew report points to a series of phenomena that are well known in the world today: identity fragmentation, radical free choice, embracement of diversity, and the breakdown of organizational and...
By YOSSI PRAGER
NEW YORK (JTA) — Last week, the Pew Research Center released the first national demographic study of Jewish Americans in more than a decade. Like all such studies, there are disagreements at the edges about the accuracy of some of the results, but the study’s most significant findings have been generally accepted.
The big news is that one in five self-identified American Jews does not identify as...
BY EDMON JACE
Go figure. In a week that the Pew Research Center announced there are 6.8 million Jews in America, it was also reported that Hobby Lobby, a national chain of 561 craft goods stores does not carry any Chanukah merchandise–not a dreidel, nor a festival decoration, not a single paper Maccabee.
Ken Berwitz, on the blog “Hopelessly Partisan” reported about a friend who had been told by a...
By ALAN ELSNER
It seems like almost everyone in the American-Jewish community – with the exception of a few on the extreme right and the far left – supports the two-state solution as the only way to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
But with real negotiations now underway for the first time in years, now is the time for American Jews to move beyond mere lip service....
by NANCY K. KAUFMAN
The federal budget for fiscal year 2013 expires September 30, and a new one is nowhere in sight. The arbitrary and capricious cuts of the sequester begun in March are slated to continue for ten years unless Congress acts. The national debt ceiling must be raised in mid-October, and a minority in the House wants to defund the new health care law or shut down the...
By RABBI JONAH GEFFEN
“All seven days one makes his sukkah permanent and his home temporary.” (Mishnah Sukkah 2:9)
Succot is a holiday that is centered on the little structures we build and eat and sleep in for a week every fall. In our tradition, the succah is referenced often, but really only in two contexts. The first is physical, referring to the huts we build yearly and for all...
By MOSHE SIMON-SHOSHAN
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The scene is familiar to us all. Women of the Wall come to the Kotel to worship in the shadow of the Temple Mount. Haredi Orthodox worshippers respond by disrupting their prayers, sometimes pelting them with eggs and other objects.
Underlying these clashes are distinctly modern issues — the conflict between liberal and traditionalist Jewish movements and the proper place of religion in the...
