Reuven Rivlin, who drew criticism before becoming Israel’s president for his broadsides against non-Orthodox Jewish streams, told a group of Conservative Jews that Jews are “one big family.” “We cannot agree on everything, but we are brothers and we are one big family,” The Jerusalem Post quoted Rivlin as telling the delegation Wednesday from the…
(Religion News Service) — Rabbi David Saperstein will be named the next ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, the first non-Christian to hold the job since it was created in 1998. As ambassador, the man named as the most influential rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine in 2009, will head the State Department’s Office of International…
Hey America, it seems like you really like your Jews. That’s the takeaway from a new study by the Pew Research Center, which asked Americans to rate various religious groups on a “feeling thermometer,” where 0 is coldest and 100 is warmest. Jews earned an average score of 63 “degrees,” the highest of any religious…
(JTA) — Two decades ago the Jewish community united in support of landmark religious freedom legislation. Now the Supreme Court’s application of that law has Jewish groups divided. Leading Jewish advocacy groups denounced the court’s 5-4 decision Monday in the Hobby Lobby case granting religious freedoms protections to companies, while Orthodox groups lauded the ruling….
Israel’s Supreme Court has overturned a ruling by a court of rabbis that would have forced a mother to have her son circumcised under the terms her divorce. Circumcision is not legally obligatory for Jews in Israel, but a rabbinical court presiding over the woman’s divorce case had ruled she must fulfill her husband’s wish…
● How the Bible Became Holy By Michael Satlow Yale University Press, 368 pages, $35 ● The Composition of the Pentateuch: Renewing the Documentary Hypothesis By Joel Baden Yale University Press, 392 pages, $65 ● The Formation of the Hebrew Canon By Timothy Lim Yale University Press, 304 pages, $45 According to a Gallup poll…
This is how I feel about God. I have no reason to believe in God. I can’t defend the existence of a supernatural being on any ground, and most certainly not on any rational or scientific ones. I have no convincing anecdotal evidence to rely on either, no visions or other visceral experiences upon which…
“That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.” So said Neil deGrasse Tyson, joining Bill Nye as players in a strange cultural moment: the resurgence of magical thinking. Magical thinking, you’ll recall, refers to the misattribution of causality: The black cat meowed, and then…
100% of profits support our journalism
