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Community Israel Is Repeating The Mistakes That Led To The Temple’s Destruction
What message of Tisha B’Av is relevant for life in a sovereign state like Israel? Does the American recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel make the day of mourning for “the city that is in mourning, laid waste, despised and desolate” an anachronism? Generations of rabbis and scholars have endeavored to understand the…
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Community My Father Was A Reagan Appointee. Now, I’m Politically — And Religiously — Homeless.
Years ago, I came to the conclusion that, as a Jew, I am religiously homeless. While I am not very observant, I feel very Jewish — I just don’t perform all the rituals or believe in many of the archaic rules. But at the same time, I am unabashedly pro-Israel and believe that Jerusalem is…
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Opinion Criticizing Israel Is The Most Zionist Thing You Can Do
The 9th of Av, on which observant Jews commemorate the destruction of the Second Temple, has never been the most popular Zionist holiday. The ingathering of the exiles and the return of Jewish political sovereignty obviated, for many Zionists, any need to mourn the Temple. Some thought the day should be left to fall into…
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Community Our Selective Outrage Over Airplane Seat Change Requests
Last week, the Twitter world exploded as an in-flight romance was live tweeted at 35,000 feet on an Alaska Air flight from LaGuardia to Dallas. Over the course of the four-hour flight, we were treated to a play-by-play from two people who had switched seats in order to sit next to each other as they…
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Community At A Border Town In Mexico, Mothers Separated From Their Children Wait — And Wait
It’s July 4, and I’ve just come home after three days’ absence. My toddler puts his little arms around my neck, lays his head on my shoulder and doesn’t move for 15 minutes. He follows me all throughout the day, yells in distress if I leave the room, bites me if I don’t pay enough…
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Community Israeli And Aboriginal Australian: An Odyssey Of Self-Discovery
A version of this article originally appeared in Plus61J, an Australian-Jewish publication. Growing up in a Jewish household in suburban Sydney, Australia, Denise Langman always knew she was adopted. Her parents made no secret of the fact they first met her as a 10-month-old at the Scarba Welfare House for Children in Bondi, a Victorian…
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Community In Cologne, Archaeologists Unearth The History Of Germany’s Oldest Jewish Community
After attending the New Waves Day 2018 concert in Dusseldorf, Germany last month, I took a train to Köln, or what we know as Cologne. It was the nearest big city, and I wanted to see if the waterfront along the Rhine was as spectacular as Dusseldorf’s. But what I saw there was even grander….
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Community To The Israeli Government, The Only Kosher Wedding Is An Orthodox One
A version of this article originally appeared in Plus61J, an Australian-Jewish publication. Several years ago, when I was living in Tel Aviv, I attended the wedding of some Jewish friends. The bride and groom went out of their way to identify as secular Israelis rather than Jewish, and consistently struggled to understand my connection with…
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Culture Trump wants to honor Hannah Arendt in a ‘Garden of American Heroes.’ Is this a joke?
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Opinion A Holocaust perpetrator was just celebrated on US soil. I think I know why no one objected.
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