Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture By Mark Oppenheimer Yale University Press, 304 pages, $30. * * *| Two years ago, my friends and I were driving back from the Burning Man festival, which takes place late summer every year in Black Rock City, Nev. We were tired, hung over…
Getting Ready for the High Holy Days On Penitence: Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky prepares participants for the Yamim Nora’im, the “awesome days” of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, a time of potential inner growth and spiritual change. Participants examine the insights of Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first chief rabbi of British Mandate Palestine, in his…
The U.S. government’s top human rights body is warning that the new constitution being drafted in Afghanistan may fail to protect basic human rights while allowing conservative Islamic clerics to curtail religious freedom. A delegation from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan body set up by Congress to monitor human rights…
A new exhibit, “Exodus,” tells the story of the ship that attempted to bring more than 4,500 Holocaust survivors and displaced persons to British-controlled Palestine in 1947, only to be turned away. The British had a restrictive immigration policy in Palestine while they awaited a solution to the Arab and Jewish claims to the land…
WASHINGTON — Even as the White House pledges to salvage the Middle East peace process, administration officials are rejecting more aggressive steps being advocated by some lawmakers and former American diplomats, including the use of American troops. The effort to step up American peace-making efforts follows what critics panned as a timid administration response to…
After the Passover Massacre in Netanya in 2002, there was an outpouring of speculation that Jews again, still, faced the end of history. In an essay in The New Republic titled “Hitler is Dead,” literary editor Leon Wieseltier demolished those predicting a roundup of Jews in Times Square, a new Kristallnacht and a second Holocaust,…
Debates over homosexuality have produced national headlines throughout the summer, with much of the attention focused on the Episcopal Church and its groundbreaking decision to appoint an openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson. Yet an equally impassioned debate is raging within Conservative Jewish circles, as its top law-making body, the Committee on Jewish Law and…
‘Wien bleibt Wien,” the saying goes here — “Vienna is ever Vienna.” The former imperial capital has always regarded itself in contrast to the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world for that matter, and its Jews have been no different in that regard. From the city’s full opening to them under Emperor…
GREENVILLE, Miss.—When Lauren Antler accepted a position with Teach for America, she knew that her two-year assignment would find her teaching in a public school classroom five days a week, likely in a rural location far from her home in New York City. But when Antler, 23, landed in the Mississippi Delta community of Greenville…
I have lived in the nation’s capital for 30 years. Yet it was only this summer that I discovered Washington’s grand tribute to Samuel Gompers. Located in downtown Washington, the monument is positioned in Samuel Gompers Memorial Park on Massachusetts Avenue, a major artery, between 10th Street and 11th Street, N.W. When I conducted an…
With the Middle East peace process again in tatters, one boldface name is offering a dose of reggae for the battered sides. Singer Ziggy Marley, son of late reggae superstar Bob Marley, has penned “Shalom Salaam,” which, as he told the Forward in an interview, calls for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. “I understand the…
