One of the great contributions of kibbutz life is the notion of collective struggle and accomplishment. Missing from your otherwise lovely December 10 article, “Solar Panels To Bloom in the Negev as Israel Embarks on a Green Revolution,” was any acknowledgment that the creation of the solar industry in Israel and the leadership of the…
Edgar Bronfman’s December 17 opinion article, “Opening Our Tent,” perfectly reframes the issue of intermarriage. Jewish survivalists continually preach from a defensive and guilt-ridden posture that unless our Jewish children marry other Jews, Jewish identity is headed toward extinction. But Jewish outreach can no longer follow the old model because younger Jews are no longer…
Your December 10 article “Big Love, Jewish-Style: One Divorce, Two Marriages, Lots of Questions” quotes me incompletely and hence the result is somewhat misleading. I believe that it is unconstitutional 1) to compel a clergyman to serve as an officer of the state when he does not wish to do so, 2) to prohibit an…
I read the Forward’s December 17 story “Women Continue To Lag Behind in Top Nonprofit Positions and Pay” with my mouth literally agape. While I always suspected Jewish communal leaders in top positions made a great deal of money, I was shocked to see those numbers put on paper — and frankly, I’m appalled. Of…
Your December 10 editorial “Hiring Rights and Wrongs” notes several ways in which President Obama’s recent executive order “include[s] important safeguards” for constitutional principles, but you then criticize the president for refusing to deny faith-based organizations the right to hire their staff on the basis of religion. Moreover, you assert that it “was the law”…
I find totally unacceptable the justification by the Columbia Hillel director for forcing the Hillel-affiliated student group to withdraw its sponsorship of a campus lecture by John Ging, director of UNRWA’s Gaza operations (“Columbia Student Group Drops Sponsorship of Gaza Talk Under Pressure,” November 26). “A format that is simply standing up at a podium,…
In Lenore Skenazy’s November 26 column, “Why I Go Caroling,” she marvels that the “caroling oeuvre… is so old,” and asks, “When else do people spontaneously sing songs ripped from the Middle Ages?” I’d encourage her to learn some of the many beautiful Shabbat table songs, known as zemirot or piyyutim. While the lyrics are…
I loved your dreidel article (“‘Oh Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel,’” November 26). However, you did not mention my favorite dreidel. For some Jews, the Braille Dreidel or “Braidel” is the only Hanukkah joy they can actually “see.” Jews who are blind can easily play dreidel because the letters are printed in Braille! Rabbi Lynne Landsberg Senior…
In your November 19 editorial “Whose Jerusalem?” you accurately point out that, from 1948 to 1967, much of East Jerusalem was part of the “West Bank.” However, the editorial draws the wrong conclusion from this important piece of history. In 1947, U.N. Resolution 181 created not only a Jewish state out of the British Mandate,…
Abraham Foxman is one of the best known and one of the most formidable of Jewish communal leaders (“As Some Retire From ADL, Will Abe Be Next?” November 5). A Holocaust survivor, Abe manifests a visceral understanding of the requirements of Jewish leadership. He never wavers in his commitment to the welfare of the Jewish…
It’s troubling that a professor of Jewish history at the University of California, Davis, would disparage the federal government’s new policy affording Jewish students the same civil rights protections that have been guaranteed to other minority groups for close to 50 years (“Federal Civil Rights Policy Expanded To Protect Jewish College Students,” November 12). David…
אַלעקס דאַפֿנער, פֿון מעלבורן, אַנאַליזירט די באַדינגונגען וואָס האָבן אפֿשר דערפֿירט צו דעם אומגליק.
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