Two months after being aggressively heckled by Muslim students in a high-profile incident at the University of California, Irvine, Israel’s ambassador to the United States is getting a chilly advance reception at a school one might have expected to be friendlier turf: Brandeis University. The announcement that Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren would be delivering the…
The Rabbinical Council of America, centrist Orthodoxy’s largest rabbinic association, has officially shut the door on the idea of having women in the Orthodox rabbinate. Yet, female Orthodox religious leaders and some of their key supporters took heart from the vagueness of the resolution the group passed. The loopholes they saw in it gave them…
Each weekday morning, my day begins the same way. I roll out of bed and make the kids’ lunches. I pack a sandwich in a Tupperware box and then gather the fruit, granola bar, and cheese-stick, and shove them all in the lunchbox. Some mornings, the items fit in the lunchbox with ease. Other mornings…
Find a Jewish man. Get married in your early 20s. Give birth soon after. Ultimately become a grandmother. That’s the ideal that many young Jewish girls are raised with. But moms today are ditching old stereotypes and creating new traditions. They are becoming mothers their own way — having kids later in life, without partners,…
This week on the Forward Roundtable, reporter Josh Nathan-Kazis sits down with staff writer Gal Beckerman and speaks via phone with Washington correspondent Nathan Guttman. They discuss the extent to which American officials see U.S. interests as being in line with Israeli interests, the resurgence of long-dormant dual-loyalty fears among American Jews, and just how…
The first in a series of podcasts jointly produced by the Forward’s Sisterhood blog and the Jewish feminist magazine Lilith features Forward and Lilith staffers discussing a range of Jewish women’s issues. On the agenda: the debate over what Orthodox women serving in rabbinic roles should be called, Jewish women in the business of advice,…
Responding to concerns of the Jewish community over pressuring Israel’s government, President Obama has written a letter to Jewish leaders, assuring them that special relations between the United States and Israel will not change. Obama addressed the letter to Alan Solow, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and a personal…
A video playing on a loop at an exhibition of Julie Mauskop’s paintings shows her grandmother frying eggs. It could be any morning of any day. There is nothing significant about the moment, beyond its utter normalcy. And that’s the point. Mauskop’s grandparents are survivors of Auschwitz. Their arms bear numbers. But you won’t see…
Dual loyalty is an old and nefarious accusation. It has dogged Jews for centuries in any land where they settled and began to feel comfortable — the allegation that their allegiance is to their tribe first and not to their nation. America has been a haven precisely because the moments when this fear has swelled…
U.S. Army general David Petraeus might have shocked some pro-Israel activists when he openly spelled out the difficulties caused to American military efforts by the lack of progress in the Middle East, but fellow generals were not taken by surprise. “CENTCOM commanders had always said this was the No. 1 issue that affects everything that…
When a bill calling for divestment from some companies doing business with Israel surfaced at a mid-March student government committee hearing at the University of California, Berkeley, local Jewish communal watchdogs were taken by surprise. When the divestment measure was overwhelmingly approved at a student senate debate days later, some students affiliated with Hillel left…
