Rebecca Spence
By Rebecca Spence
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News Conservative Judaism’s Flagship Seminary Opens Door to Gays and Lesbians
Ending nearly two decades of debate, the flagship seminary of Conservative Judaism announced this week that it would now accept gay and lesbian students into its rabbinical and cantorial schools. But a subsequent declaration from the movement’s Israeli seminary upholding the ban on gay rabbinical students made clear that the issue was far from settled…
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Israel News Fashionista Finds Her Fellow Funders
Jewish philanthropists and Jewish fashion moguls don’t often run in the same circles, but a recent parlay of the tribe’s top donors may have changed all that: Sartorial superstar Donna Karan dipped her toes into the pool of Jewish givers last week when she made an unexpected appearance at the 2007 Jewish Funders Network conference…
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News Bill Calls for Canceling Poor Nations’ Debt
In biblical times, the existence of the Sabbatical year was a boon to anyone plagued by the habit of overspending: Every seven years, all debts were forgiven, those literally enslaved to their debts were freed and community members were set back on equal footing. Now, in a fresh twist on an ancient Jewish tradition, a…
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News West Coast Seminary Opens Doors to Gays
In the wake of Conservative Judaism’s historic vote to permit the ordination of gay and lesbian rabbis, the movement’s West Coast seminary has accepted its first openly gay students. Two gay applicants — one man, one woman — have been accepted for the fall by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of…
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News Jesus Film Slammed by Scholars, Christians
The Orthodox Jewish director of a new documentary about Jesus’ purported burial chamber is beating back a flurry of attacks, saying that Jewish archaeologists and Christian scholars are threatened by the implications of his claim. “Israeli archaeologists don’t like to find anything connected with Jesus, because it seems to ‘Christianize’ Jewish history, and Christian scholars…
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News Aggressive Tactics Of Shoah Deniers Eyed After Attack on Wiesel
The recent assault on one of the world’s most recognizable survivors of Nazi death camps, Elie Wiesel, has several Jewish communal leaders warning that Holocaust deniers are resorting to increasingly aggressive tactics. In the attack, which occurred February 1 but was not picked up by the media for several days, the author and Nobel Peace…
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News Brandeis Seen Avoiding Controversial Speakers
In the wake of former president Jimmy Carter’s high-profile visit to Brandeis University, the school is being accused of blocking controversial speakers, both pro- and anti-Israel, from making future speeches on campus. Late last month, Brandeis administrators denied a request by student groups to bring Norman Finkelstein, a left-wing political theory professor well known for…
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News Left-wing Critics of Israel Launch Blog To Combat Alleged Intimidation
In the wake of an increasing flurry of attacks leveled against left-wing Jewish groups by their right-wing counterparts, one dovish group is fighting back. Jewish Voice for Peace, a San Francisco-based organization, recently launched a blog to track what it describes as a growing epidemic of intimidation and harassment from fellow Jews seeking to stifle…
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