In 1940, an article appeared in Prague’s Jewish newspaper entitled, “Healthy Youth – Healthy Homeland.” “Which do you prefer,” it began, “a proud and tall suntanned lad, or a flabby, nervous youngster with drooping shoulders? Probably the first. But what are you doing about emulating him? Nothing!” The piece was written by Alfred (Fredy) Hirsch,…
When author Amy Krouse Rosenthal died last year at the age of 51, she left a legacy of more than 30 books, as well as a widely-shared New York Times article that served as a dating profile for her spouse, titled “You May Want To Marry My Husband.” Beginning next week, her name will continue…
Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo picked up the phone and called the spiritual leader of the New York Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, Satmar Grand Rabbi Aron Teitelbaum, to try to shake a compromise out of a recalcitrant state senator. According to two people familiar with the negotiations, the call was part of an effort…
Through the extreme efforts of a rogue lawmaker who held the entire state budget hostage, New York’s powerful Hasidic groups may have found a way to derail a movement to force them to improve the secular education they give their children. A provision forced into New York state’s budget by Simcha Felder, and supported by…
Israel has rejected a billboard campaign by Reform Jews that urged female passengers at Ben-Gurion Airport not to give up their flight seats to ultra-Orthodox men refusing to sit next to women. The campaign was launched by the Israel Religious Action Center, the advocacy arm of the Reform Movement in Israel, which had hoped to…
When Rabbi Steven Wernick interviewed to be chief executive of the Conservative movement’s umbrella organization in 2009, he came prepared and had “done his homework,” according to a former board officer who was present. He was then head rabbi of a synagogue in Philadelphia’s wealthy Main Line suburb. Board members were particularly impressed by how…
The latest battle in the “free speech wars” on college campuses took place at the University of Pennsylvania this month, where a professor known for her controversial views on affirmative action was removed from her position teaching mandatory first-year classes. Amy Wax, a tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, had made disparaging…
The Hillel at Harvard University is sponsoring a Seder this Passover that is aligned with a protest movement critical of Israel, a move that required the students to position the event carefully in order to hold it under Hillel’s auspices. Scheduled for the evening of April 5, the seventh night of Passover, the festive meal…
Two summers ago, a female Purdue University sophomore stopped in at her campus Hillel house for a meeting. The building was empty, save for the student, a friend, and the man they had come to see, 53-year-old Hillel director Phillip Schlossberg. When she started at Purdue the year before, the student had been eager to…
A group of rabbis who support the Conservative movement’s ban on intermarriage are mounting a highly unusual challenge to colleagues who have been hand-picked to assume the leadership of their professional body, the Rabbinical Assembly. The movement, a liberal denomination that adheres to Jewish law, bans intermarriage, but some of its rabbis bitterly oppose the…
More than a million Americans marched against gun violence across the country Saturday – with approximately 800,000 in Washington, D.C. alone – but the few thousand marchers here had the honor of shouting in earshot of President Trump as he seeks his usual weekend pleasures far away from life in the capital. If Trump thought…
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