Shaul Magid
By Shaul Magid
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Opinion Open Letter | Brandeis University Press is silencing debate
Read a response to this letter from Brandeis University Press here. We are a group of scholars whose research is connected to American Jewish history and experience. All of us have read the preface that Professor Marc Dollinger submitted to Brandeis University Press this fall. We hold a variety of perspectives about its claims and…
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Opinion How The New Israel Litmus Test Turns Jews Into Christian Zionists
Over the past few months, a controversy has rocked the Jewish community. After David Myers was appointed president and CEO of the Center for Jewish History, in Manhattan, a small group of individuals published a scathing letter accusing Myers of supporting a boycott of Israel and undermining the Israel Defense Forces. On the grounds that…
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Opinion Why Conversion Lite Won’t Fix The Intermarriage Problem
In a recent essay in The Jewish Week titled “Mikveh Can Solve Conversion Problem”, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove presented a courageous attempt to address arguably the most pressing problem of 21st century American Jewry: intermarriage. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the problem of intermarriage is that for many Millennials, it is not a problem at…
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Opinion How Trump Pleased Bibi Netanyahu And David Duke Alike
What was noteworthy about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent summit with President Trump was that the leaders’ press conference had little to do with Israel. An Israeli reporter asked Trump the following question: “Mr. President, since your election campaign and even after your victory, we’ve seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents across the United…
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News Reb Zalman Married Counter Culture to Hasidic Judaism
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, one of the important Jewish innovators in postwar America, inspiration to a generation and ecumenical spiritualist, died on July 3 aged 89. A tireless organizer and spiritual architect, Schachter-Shalomi single-handedly created a new form of Jewish practice and spirituality known as Jewish Renewal, founded on the idea of Gaia consciousness: the notion…
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Opinion The Dark Side of Purim
Esther denouncing Haman / Ernest Normand These days, many liberal Jews think of Purim as a play date for the kids and a night of drunken debauchery for the grown-ups. We think of costumes and songs and noisemakers, a kind of carnival spirit. But the levity with which we approach Purim is actually pretty astonishing….
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Culture The Triumph and Tragedy of Counter-Cultural Judaism
HOLY BEGGARS: A JOURNEY FROM HAIGHT STREET TO JERUSALEM By Aryae Coopersmith One World Lights, 400 pages, $18 ‘Holy Beggars” is a much anticipated account of San Francisco’s House of Love and Prayer, which served as an important home of the Jewish counter-culture from 1967 to 1971, and its spiritual leader, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. It…
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Culture Jacob Frank and the Heresy We Forgot
THE MIXED MULTITUDE: JACOB FRANK AND THE FRANKIST MOVEMENT, 1755–1816 By Pawel Maciejko University of Pennsylvania Press, 360 pages, $65 “History is written by the winners.” Whether or not Napoleon Bonaparte first uttered this, the sentiment behind it applies to the arch-heretic Jacob Frank, who died while Napoleon was still an obscure lieutenant colonel in…
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