I have a confession to make: I’m in a mixed marriage. But not the kind you usually think of when you hear the term, which conjures up images of countless Tevyes sitting shiva. These days – and in Israel, in particular – “mixed marriage” refers not so much to two people of different religions, but…
Reading the substance of the new Western Wall deal, described in a news report posted by the Forward as a is heartbreaking. As Shulamit Magnus rightly argues in the Jerusalem Post, the Kotel is not now, nor has it ever been, a synagogue. Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz is not the Wall’s mara de’atra (“master of the…
To many Jews, Ted Cruz’s attack on Donald Trump’s “New York values” . We are familiar with Republicans suspicious of “money and the media,” because 20 years ago they were the people complaining that the golf club was getting crowded with hook-noses. But to religious Jews like me, this vision of a materialistic, secular New…
Anti-Semitism “continued to be a major problem around the globe,” the U.S. State Department’s annual International Religious Freedom Report for 2014 found. The 17th annual report, which was released Wednesday, noted that anti-Semitic incidents rose significantly in Western Europe during the 2014 Gaza War between Israel and Hamas as well as in eastern Ukrainian regions…
I recently attended a wedding where the bride and groom shared Chinese, American and Eastern European roots. Their parents were raised Catholic, Lutheran and Jewish. But the wedding itself, both ceremony and reception, were completely, utterly, 100% secular. God was not invited; no religious ritual made an appearance. Welcome to the new America. I thought…
The Pew Research Center’s newly released 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study offers a trove of data on American Jews based on interviews with 35,071 American adults, 847 of whom identified their faith as Jewish. Here are some of the more interesting findings about the Jews. We’re highly educated! There are more American Jews with two…
America’s culture wars hit a boiling point last week over Indiana’s religious liberty bill, which was widely portrayed as giving license for “anti-gay discrimination” by allowing business to refuse serving potential patrons on account of their sexual orientation. The negative characterization of the bill has dominated the national conversation as a raft of critics —…
Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, and the state lawmakers who approved their own version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act say that they are shocked, shocked, shocked at the uproar, divisiveness and potential economic pain that the new law is bringing to their state. We’d rather they would just be honest and acknowledge that in the…
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