Rabbi Salkin is a contributing editor to Religion News Service; the co-founder and co-director of Wisdom Without Walls, an online salon for Jewish ideas; and the author of, most recently, Tikkun Ha’Am/Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism.
As the New York Times reported this weekend, Israel is under attack. Except, this time, the tools of attack are not military. They are not rockets fired on Sderot from Gaza, or Hezbollah-sponsored salvos from Lebanon. The attacks are not even located in Israel itself. They are attacks on the very idea of Israel, and…
How do you say kaddish for a magazine that lived to be 100 years old? Because that is precisely what many fans of The New Republic are doing, as well as engaging in the more of-this-world-ly act of cancelling their subscriptions. By now, everyone in the literary world and blogosphere is aware of what has…
“Car Talk” hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi It’s a stereotype, but Jewish men have an ancient and mostly well-earned reputation for not being able to fix things. (There have been many notable exceptions to this, including my father, who could fix anything). I have done my best to uphold this proud tradition of our people….
You would have to have a heart encrusted with cynicism to not be moved by Malala Yousafzai. It is, in many ways, a modern miracle. An activist for equal education for young girls in her native Pakistan, Malala survived a Taliban bullet and expanded her local quest into an international movement for women’s education in…
A few of the author’s many blue inks on paper. / Jeffrey K. Salkin It’s time for me to confess my hobby. I collect and use fountain pens. I have no memory of how I first got into this particular way of writing. No, it has nothing to do with the fabled “Today I am…
In the story of Cain and Abel, it says: “And Cain said to Abel his brother…” (Genesis 4:8) But what did Cain say? There is nothing in the text about what he said to his brother. The ancient rabbis imagined an entire conversation between the brothers. And what was the conversation about? One ancient sage…
There has been near-universal joyous reaction to Pope Francis’s recent proclamation that the Roman Catholic Church needs to focus less on issues like homosexuality, abortion and contraception and more on other, deeper spiritual matters. The Holy Father has been lauded for his humility, and his reasoned stance that the Church needs to find a new…
The poet-laureate of the Jewish people, Chaim Nachman Bialik, once wrote a poem in which he extolled someone who died “before his time and before anyone’s time. He had one more song to sing, but now that song is stilled forever.” That’s how I feel, and the way that many of us feel, about the…
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