Roberta Rosenthal Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at DePaul University College of Law. She is the author of Remix Judaism: Transmitting Tradition in a Diverse World, The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition, and The Soul of Creativity. Her chapter on “Lawmaking in the Conservative Movement” will be published next year in the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Law.
How you get to shul is not as important as whether you live a Jewish life
It is impossible to fathom how Conservative Judaism can retain its members if it allows its clergy to officiate intermarriages
In an increasingly partisan society, law students in particular must learn how to respect dissenting views
Every year in the dead of the winter, when the Torah cycle entered Vayikra, or Leviticus, I used to release a huge sigh of frustration. One of my synagogue’s ritual directors used to call this book “the barbeque section of the Torah” because it is largely concerned with the why’s and how’s of animal sacrifice,…
To appease an ultra-Orthodox male, flight attendants on Israel’s national airline El Al asked an 81-year-old female passenger to change her seat on a flight from Newark to Tel Aviv. The man cited “the Torah” as his reason for not wanting to make inadvertent physical contact with a woman. The Israel Religious Action Center, a…
When Anne Frank wrote in her diary to pass the time, she probably never even thought about copyright law or the sticky question of who would come to own her words. She died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 at the age of 15, but her father Otto survived and eventually was persuaded to…
(JTA) — The Conservative movement was once the very embodiment of what it meant to be an “American Jew.” As the 130th anniversary of the founding of its flagship Jewish Theological Seminary approaches in 2016, the centrist movement that historically straddled the polarities of Reform and Orthodox is struggling to maintain its identity and attract…
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