“Rachel” an ultra-Orthodox mother of 12 living in Jerusalem, got divorced this week. It’s cause for celebration for two reasons. First, this grants her much-needed freedom from her severely violent and erratic now-ex-husband, a man who viciously controlled, manipulated and abused her and her children during the marriage and separation. But the real jubilation is…
Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America By Keren R. McGinity New York University Press, 305 pages. Freelance writer Beth Levine intended to marry a Jewish man and raise “nominally Jewish children,” although she could not define what being a Jew meant. But, after marrying Bill Squire, a gentile, in 1991, she…
Massechet Sotah in the Babylonian Talmud is not the best place to look for perspectives that contemporary Jews hold on relationships. In fact, you’d imagine that such a tractate would be about as informative as the book of Leviticus is on contemporary attitudes of dinner etiquette. But there on the very first page of Sotah…
My American-Jewish childhood may have been typical: Friday night dinner was followed by 20/20 on TV, Saturday morning synagogue often preceded a trip to the mall. I went to a Conservative Jewish day school where controversial topics were often discussed openly, though not interfaith dating or marriage. The implied assumption was: We were expected to…
I was raised a white-boy Mormon in Salt Lake City in the 1960s. It was a good place to grow up, except that everybody looked like me, and almost everybody practiced the same religion. The only “exotic” person I knew was my best friend in junior high, Barney Josephson. He was Jewish, but he stood…
I had a jarring conversation with a young woman last week. In a discussion about the challenges women face in Orthodoxy, she turned to me with a cheeky smile and declared, “I am not a feminist.” She described her perceptions of Shira Hadasha, the pioneering partnership synagogue in Jerusalem where men and women share certain…
The Orthodox Union’s Nathan Diament has some advice for Barack Obama. Writing in The New Republic, Diament — the OU’s public policy director — urges the incoming president to do more than offer religious voters symbols, like an inaugural invocation by Rev. Rick Warren. Obama, Diament writes, has an opportunity to “advance policies that are…
From Muslim imams to conservative rabbis and practically every faith in between, religion and religious leaders were front and center at the recent Republican and Democratic political conventions. Expect more of the same in the coming two months as Barack Obama and John McCain and their political parties court the religious vote. But is this…
100% of profits support our journalism
