Andy Bachman
By Andy Bachman
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Letters Talking about Israel-Palestine with children is hard. Jewish camps are doing their best
There's a vast landscape of ways that camps choose to address the complicated realities of conflict in the Middle East
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Community Eulogy: Naomi Levine, civil rights activist, NYU doyen and ‘force of nature’
The shortest job interview I ever had was with the most powerful woman in the world, Naomi B. Levine, who died today at age 98. Naomi was Senior Vice President for External Affairs at New York University, and I was a young rabbi hoping to serve as executive director of the Edgar M. Bronfman Center…
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Opinion Biden the Biblical: Sacred echoes of our new president’s past
The race to the White House between President Trump and Joe Biden has finally reached its conclusion with a Biden victory. This race was not about policy, though. It was about character, and Biden’s victory represents the triumph of decency over its opposite. But there’s another aspect of Biden’s personal story that hasn’t been as…
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Opinion Young Jews Protesting Trump’s Camps Remind The Establishment What Jewish History Stands For.
Historical moments of reckoning have a way of galvanizing American Jewry. Mass migration, dislocation, pogroms, persecution and the First World War created new institutions of Jewish life in America that rescued and integrated nearly three million Jews into the unique discourse of a participatory American republican democracy. The Zionist project and then the rehabilitation of…
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Opinion Jewish Extremists Want the Western Wall? I Say Let Them Have It.
The latest campaign by leaders of the Reform movement of American Judaism to galvanize support for equal-access prayer at the Western Wall, known as Judaism’s “holiest site,” is a morally worthy goal. Given the remarkable degree of religious freedom enjoyed by the vast majority of Americans, an idea encoded in our very Constitution, it is…
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Opinion An Eloquent Message About Race That Jews Need to Read
The publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s stirring and pained “Between the World and Me” might just provide the kind of watershed moment for redefining the Black-Jewish relationship in the United States. Jewish leaders should seize it by encouraging their communities to read the book and talk about its implications for us both as Americans and Jews….
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Opinion If Jewish Seminaries Are Empty, Let’s Merge Them
A recent Forward article asked a provocative and troubling question: “Where Are All the Non-Orthodox Rabbis?” It pointed to a steep decline in enrollment at non-Orthodox rabbinical schools, which should prompt some new thinking. Here’s a start: Why not merge the Reform and Conservative seminaries? Last year, the non-Orthodox rabbinical schools admitted fewer than 100…
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Opinion Censoring Hillels Goes Against Jewish Traditions
Hillel President Eric Fingerhut chats with a student. Flickr: Hillel News and Views. Hillel, the ancient sage, was famously impossible to insult. The Talmud portrays intellectuals, rebellious students, passersby and would-be converts as offering jokes, specious arguments, and outrageous claims — all to rattle the unflappable teacher. But in the face of faulty arguments, Hillel…
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