Bethamie Horowitz
By Bethamie Horowitz
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Opinion We the Individuals
For a generation of American Jewish baby boomers who grew up looking east toward Zion from the West’s leafy suburbs, Israel has always come off as the poorer relation enduring scrappier circumstances. America had what Israel lacked: a Constitution, and good plumbing. American bathrooms were tidy and porcelain, with soft rolls of Charmin; the typical…
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Opinion Cultivate Communal Connection Beyond Organizational Affiliation
Everyone knows that there is a daunting number of Jewish organizations in America. A recent volume of the American Jewish Year Book lists more than 500 operating at the national level, not to speak of those operating locally. The veritable babble of acronyms underscores the community’s hyper-organized character: UJA, AJC, JDC, ADL, AIPAC, IPF, NIF,…
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Opinion Looking ‘White,’ Thinking ‘Other’
‘Be a Jew in private and a human being in public.” This was the mantra with which a generation of American Jews was raised, and the idea was to keep the Jewish particulars to yourself and blend in to the American dream. But the quality of the American Jewish experience has changed in the past…
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Opinion A Tradition of Questioning Tradition
Despite the classic worries that American Jews are evaporating into America at a rapid pace, a study recently issued by the American Jewish Committee gives an indication of just how distinctive Jews have remained here in the great melting pot. The report, by Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center, reveals that Jews are…
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Opinion Social Research: Out From Under the Organizational Umbrella
Jewish social research, to judge by a series of recent developments, is shifting its base from the organizational world to the academy. Earlier this month, Michael Steinhardt, chairman of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, donated $12 million to establish the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis University. The gift forms the endowment for the institute, whose…
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Opinion The Evolving Involvement of American Jews
An essay by a newly Orthodox Jewish writer provoked plenty of ire not so long ago, when she criticized the fictional characters created by various authors whom she said had “renounced Orthodox Judaism.” Leaving aside questions about her literary judgment, what intrigued me was the writer’s own new-found religion, pointing as it does to something…
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Opinion Is Assimilation All That Bad?
In 1928, Louis Wirth published “The Ghetto,” a book whose title pointed to the importance of tangible corporate boundaries in the lives of Jews in Chicago. By the century’s end, the markers of identity had shifted from the physical and geographic expressions of social distance between Jews and “America” to a more inward, individual calculus…
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Opinion When Emotion Trumps Reason
Over and over again this year, I’ve heard people say that although they’ve voted solidly Democratic in the past, they now lean Republican because of their concerns about Israel and the Middle East. I located a few warm bodies willing to explain the feelings that have compelled them to switch. My exploratory interviews found that…
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