It used to be thought that the Second Commandment’s prohibition on making images meant there could not be a Jewish visual art. In his 1966 essay “Is There a Jewish Art?” art critic Harold Rosenberg grappled with the very question posed by his title. He didn’t think there was, because he didn’t think there was…
The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary has received a $175,300 grant to make available a collection of rare materials from the Jewish communities of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. According to an email sent by Naomi M. Steinberger, Director of Library Services at JTS, the Cataloguing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant comes…
Rabbi Eli Kavon’s colleagues don’t consider him a rabbi. Ordained in two years via a correspondence course by a virtually unknown rabbinical seminary in Long Island, he’s not a member of any mainstream rabbinical association. Nor is Kavon eligible for membership on the local board of rabbis. His congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Boca Raton,…
When Rabbi Daniel Gordis, an influential essayist living in Israel, argued in the pages of Commentary magazine that young, non-Orthodox, American rabbis were increasingly anti-Israel, his controversial article was met with anger — and disbelief. To rabbinical students and their deans in particular, his observations and the conclusion he drew from them simply did not…
I don’t have time to write this blog because I have an infant on my lap. But I am driven to write because I do not hear my voice represented in the discussions about motherhood and the rabbinate. Recently Rabbi Jill Levy, who was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote on The Sisterhood about…
It did not feel like a compliment when someone told me that I was the “prettiest” rabbi he had ever seen. Nor did it feel like a compliment when a congregant said he was really impressed with me although he always thought “ima” — Hebrew for mother — “did not belong on the bima.” I…
Rachel Isaacs has known, for as long as she can remember, that she wanted to be a rabbi. But Isaacs, who on May 19 became the first openly gay rabbi of either sex to be ordained by the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, knew by the time she was in college that she wouldn’t be…
In July, Cantor Nancy Abramson will assume duties as Director of the H. L. Miller Cantorial School and College of Jewish Music at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her appointment comes more than a year after JTS announced that it would be eliminating the position of dean of its cantorial school — and that longtime dean…
