When I was in high school, I stopped wearing my kippah. I felt myself drifting away from the ultra-Orthodox community of my childhood and the Modern Orthodoxy my parents tried to model for me at home. I stopped wearing my kippah because I wanted to disaffiliate from the Orthodox Jews that filled New York City…
(JTA) — Mario Cuomo, the three-term New York governor who died Thursday, was the rare politician who appealed to the Jewish tent’s opposite poles. A strident liberal with a nuanced understanding of the sense of vulnerability among the deeply religious in a secular society, Cuomo died of heart failure just hours after his son Andrew…
(Haaretz) — There really shouldn’t be anything controversial about a traditional Jewish Friday night dinner. After all, a nice meal with a blessing over candles, wine, and challah bread never hurt anybody. Even secular Israelis who don’t find traditional Jewish practice their cup of tea, or simply embrace the idea of Friday night as “family…
The First Station looks like a typical outdoor mall, with shops and cafes inside a renovated Ottoman-era train hub. But the year-old center, with its porous design, non-kosher eateries, and shops open for business on the Jewish Sabbath, is a subtle rebuke to two forces that have shaped modern West Jerusalem: ultra-Orthodoxy and Palestinian suicide…
On Monday, citizens of Quebec will go to the polls to vote for a new provincial government. Two main players are facing off in this year’s elections: the Parti Quebecois (PQ), Quebec’s nationalist party currently ruling as a minority government and led by Premier Pauline Marois, against Quebec’s Liberal Party, ousted from power in 2012…
(Haaretz) — As a certified sex educator who runs a side business out of her home selling dilators and vibrators to the ultra-Orthodox and secular alike, Beverley Damelin was certain she had seen and heard it all. That includes the case of an elderly ultra-Orthodox woman who recently summoned Damelin to Bnei Brak so she…
In a landmark vote, the Knesset has allowed Israeli Jewish couples to do what their American counterparts have long done: Shop for a rabbi. The Knesset vote marked the first tangible gain for secular Israel since the country’s ultra-Orthodox parties were frozen out of the government after the last election. But the new law still…
One of the most bitterly fought cities in Israel’s local elections held on Tuesday was Beit Shemesh, the flashpoint town near Jerusalem. Now, the government is apparently mulling a plan to prevent passions getting so high in the future. Beit Shemesh is famous for its deep tensions between Haredi and non-Haredi residents. In fact, since…
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