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…
We may fret about declining enrollments in rabbinical seminaries and the ever-rising tide of intermarriage, yet one aspect of the contemporary Jewish experience should lift our spirits rather than roil them: music. From monthly concerts and annual festivals that cast a spotlight on the creativity that pulses throughout the community to Shabbat services where, week…
The U.S. Senate approved Reform movement leader Rabbi David Saperstein as Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom at the State Department. The Senate approved Saperstein for the post on Friday by a vote of 61 to 35. He will be the fourth person and the first non-Christian to serve in the post. The ambassador…
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