On Sunday night, my family went to the July 4th celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. The concert was by the LA Philharmonic, accompanied by Vince Gil, and concluded with fireworks. The music was fantastic; the fireworks were spectacular. The evening included an awe-inspiring tribute to members of the five branches of the armed forces. Those…
A small Modern Orthodox rabbinic organization has thrust itself into the ongoing debate over women’s religious leadership by passing a resolution that goes further than the major Modern Orthodox rabbinic association in defining roles for female spiritual leaders. The new resolution, passed in late June at a convention of the International Rabbinic Fellowship, lays out…
At some point, the shouts of “Heil Hitler” that often greeted Marcus Eilenberg as he walked to the 107-year-old Moorish-style synagogue in this port city forced the 32-year-old attorney to make a difficult, life-changing decision: Fearing for his family’s safety after repeated anti-Semitic incidents, Eilenberg reluctantly uprooted himself and his wife and two children, and…
A Taglit-Birthright tour visiting Israel in early July made a stop in a city that most of these groups have studiously avoided: Hebron. And this stop has raised questions about whether Birthright can travel beyond the so-called Green Line into the Israeli-occupied West Bank, with differing answers from American and Israeli Birthright officials. The visit…
If only Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky could see what has become of his great-grandson, David Axelrod. The 49-year-old Russian émigré to Israel has adorned his modest living room with a singular-framed photograph: a bird’s-eye view of Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock — Islam’s third-holiest shrine — digitally replaced with an image of an…
New York Governor David Paterson is seeking to make New York the latest state to channel public funds to yeshiva students through legislation that even staunch defenders of religion-state separation acknowledge as constitutional. A provision inserted in New York State’s austerity budget at Paterson’s insistence would provide $31.1 million over two years to students in…
Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, said his country’s position regarding the peace process has evolved markedly over the past 17 years, and rejected remarks that Israel was interested only in dictating terms to the Palestinians. Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to Washington from 2002 to 2006, and second in command at the Foreign Ministry since the…
Since at least the 1990s, one of the chief concerns of the American Jewish community has been the problem of intermarriage. With the perception that an increasing number of American Jews are marrying outside the faith, the problem of how to stop the attrition has been a major preoccupation. But a fairly simple strategy has…
Remembering Hannah Senesh at Museum of Jewish Heritage Luncheon “I felt I was in the presence of someone special,” Auschwitz survivor Susan Beer said of her encounter in 1944 with Hannah Senesh in a Budapest prison when Beer spoke at the 18th annual Spring Women’s Luncheon of the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living…
Like other women before her who saw a wrong and did something to right it, Catherine Orenstein decided to act. Rather than just lament that women’s opinions and voices are grossly underrepresented on the Op-Ed pages and in other aspects of the media, Orenstein, 40, founded an organization to correct the imbalance. In January 2008,…
Mandel bread makes most Jews — or roughly 0.2% of the world’s population — swoon. Biscotti make everyone who has ever entered a Starbucks swoon, or roughly 53% of the world’s population. These are guesstimates, of course, done on the back of an espresso-stained napkin. But my point (unlike a biscuit dipped too long in…
