Jordie Gerson
By Jordie Gerson
-
Opinion I Am The Rabbi, Not His Assistant. We Must Fight The Erasure Of Female Clergy
A few weeks ago I got home from the URJ Biennial – a convention of 6000 Reform Jews from all over the world who come together to sing, prayand learn for five days. Among the attendees there were dozens of women Rabbis, and many more female Jewish professionals. All attendees wore name tags which gave…
-
Opinion Destroying the Johnson Amendment Moves America Closer to Theocracy
Nothing threatens Jews more than theocracy. When powerful regimes have tried to impose their beliefs on religious minorities, we’ve ended up expelled (The Spanish Inquisition), dead (The Crusades) or coerced into conversion (The Almohad Caliphate in Morocco). It’s no less true today than it was in 1492: every single brick removed from the American wall…
-
Life Marching on Washington Affirms My Jewish Values — Especially on Shabbat
Prophecy has never been non-partisan. For thousands of years, Judaism (and especially the writings of the prophets) has contained ethical and moral imperatives that require an engagement with the world, and offer not just the vision of a messianic age – but a demand that we, as Jews, help create it. Years after Rabbi Abraham…
-
Life Israeli Court Ruling Gives Women Long-Sought Access to ‘Sacred Space’ at Western Wall
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously made a distinction between sacred space and sacred time. Jews – who for much of history were itinerant, kicked out of one country, and expelled from another – sanctified time, unlike Christians, who sanctified space. Sacred space took a back seat to sacred time and Shabbat, he argued, no matter…
-
Opinion Why Jews Need To Stop Using the Word ‘Christian’ as a Slur
There is a widespread but little-mentioned problem in Judaism today: namely, the derisive dismissal of Reform Jews by the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox. This often takes the form of slurs and insults. One of the most noxious and oft-repeated of these is the assertion that Reform Jews are not really Jews, but Christians. As a Reform…
-
Opinion What a Swastika Means to Reform Jews in Today’s America
One morning in early January, the students and faculty of Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion’s Cincinnati campus, the longtime seat of Reform Judaism in America, woke up to find themselves victims of anti-Semitism. A large, white swastika had been scrawled on the seminary’s red entrance sign. You couldn’t miss it. Though traumatic…
-
Life Second Thoughts From a Member of Pantsuit Nation
Full disclosure #1: I am a member of Pantsuit Nation, that Hillary Clinton adoring Facebook group that has, more than anything else in the past few months, served as testimony to the viral power of the internet and the upside to armchair activism. Full disclosure #2: I loved (past-tense) Pantsuit Nation. For weeks, just after…
-
Opinion Hillel’s Cancellation of Shavit: PR Move, or Return to Jewish Values?
In an uncharacteristic, and laudable move, yesterday Hillel International cancelled Ari Shavit’s book tour of US college campuses after accusations of sexual harassment against Danielle Berrin were made public. Hillel and other major Jewish organizations, have not always been as quick on the draw. In lower profile sexual harassment cases on individual campuses, and organizations…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward The far left and far right are equally antisemitic? A new study suggests otherwise
- 2
Culture Echoing the language of antisemites, Emmanuel Macron has started to embrace the D-word
- 3
Culture Can Massachusetts really be as antisemitic as they say?
- 4
Culture Kissinger at 100: ‘If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be antisemitic.’
In Case You Missed It
-
Art How a ‘wise man of the shtetl’ evaded Soviet repression and antisemitism to achieve international fame as an artist
-
Culture Why is the name of ‘the most vicious antisemite in the English-speaking world’ still so prominent at Cornell?
-
News Head of Yad Vashem decries a ‘new low’ in efforts to gloss over Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust
-
Fast Forward Celebrate Israel parade generates controversy over participation of Israeli officials
Engage
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
