Annual weekend retreats at resorts or hotels, known as shabbatons, are staples of Jewish organizations’ calendars, where members learn, pray, strategize and bond together. It’s normal for shabbaton organizers to plan ahead to ensure their kosher needs are met, but it’s rare for them to ensure that the employees are treated fairly — much less…
NEW YORK (JTA) — In the upstairs sanctuary of a Manhattan synagogue, a group of rabbis is studying Jewish texts on pluralism and community. One floor below, 22 students are sitting in pairs poring over the book of Exodus. The students spend all day, every weekday in the building, studying Jewish text and observing strict…
A white rabbi and black minister (this isn’t the start of a joke) link arms and are swept up in the sound of a gospel song. Not only the two clergymen. As the song soars, an entire congregation is on its feet in this Orthodox house of prayer and the congregants are trying to overcome…
Last June, Jane Eisner participated in a private roundtable discussion at the Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem about Israel’s Jewish identity. What came out of the talks was the sense that Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora face a similar challenge — how to be a modern people in a modern world while holding…
This is the thirteenth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. I am a Jewish feminist because my mom decided to put on a tallit and tefillin when I was 10. I remember that she asked my younger brother and me if we were okay with this decision. After all, she was also our…
Oh to be a working mother in Israel, where women who give birth will soon get 14 weeks of paid maternity leave. Fourteen weeks? I’d have been happy to get 14 days of paid leave in this country. In Jane Eisner’s Forward editorial this week, she writes about Israel’s move to extend legally mandated maternity…
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