Courtesy of Agudath Israel As I concluded a yearlong course that I have been teaching at a local day school, a student approached me with a concerned look on his face. “What if I don’t know what my Jewish identity is?” I pushed him to say more. “Well, my parents had the Holocaust, but —…
Officials at Agudath Israel defended remarks by the organization’s leading rabbi, Yaakov Perlow, in which he called the religiously progressive Open Orthodox movement heretical, and criticized non-Orthodox Judaism. “This kind of stuff has been part and parcel of what our movement has been speaking about since time immemorial,” said Rabbi David Zweibel, Agudath Israel’s executive…
Rabbi Yaakov Perlow speaks at the Agudath Isael annual gala / YouTube On Wednesday we learned that, while speaking at a fundraising gala for the ultra-Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, head of that organization, slandered virtually every Jew on the planet, down to and including a bunch of plain-old-Orthodox folks. We were…
This past year saw the inaugural graduation in June of Yeshivat Maharat, the Bronx yeshiva that has been controversially training women to lead Orthodox congregations. Three new maharats emerged from the school this year. Then in the fall came the high profile installation of Rabbi Asher Lopatin as the new president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah,…
Judaism’s response to modernity over the centuries has been one of constant change, sometimes small and sometimes large. As attitudes shifted, movements developed. Reform broke from what would later be called the Orthodox mainstream. Conservative broke from Reform. Reconstructionist broke from Conservative. Traditional broke from Conservative. As the Passover song goes, Chad gadya, chad gadya….
Readers of Israel’s Haaretz.com, many of them liberal and secular, must have been surprised to read, in late October, a public manifesto, signed by 42 members of the Rabbinical Council of America castigating “Open Orthodox rabbis and leaders” in the United States. The signatories — none of them, it should be noted, an officer of…
The perils of religious self-definition became amusingly apparent in the recent Pew survey of American Jews. One category of “Jews” was “Jews by affinity” – Americans lacking any Jewish parentage or any Jewish background who simply choose to call themselves Jews; more than one million people so identified themselves. Similarly suspicious are the survey’s self-described…
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