The bar is doling out drinks as fast as it can manage. A man at the front recites Kaddish while the mixed-gender congregation slouches, sipping beer, eating snacks, talking on cell phones. It sounds like anarchy to even rabbis with the rowdiest congregations. But here, there’s consensus that this represents a renaissance for the liturgy…
Gedalya Gottdenger’s dream is to get a degree in psychology. But unlike most 21-year-olds, Gottdenger lacks a basic education, even though he has been studying since he was a child. Gottdenger, who grew up in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, is a product of ultra-Orthodox Jewish day schools in which, numerous students report, math and…
Frank Lautenberg had not cast a vote in nearly two months when aides pushed his wheelchair onto the floor of the U.S. Senate in mid-April. Lautenberg, then 89, was clearly in ill health. On Capitol Hill that day, Democrats were fighting to save gun control bills drafted after last December’s elementary school shooting in Newtown,…
Israel’s recent election was dominated by discusion of how to integrate ultra-Orthodox young men into the military. But Israelis are now facing up to the possibility that in practical terms, nothing will change on this front during the new Knesset session. In the months leading up to the election, as calls grew for an end…
Not quite suddenly — it’s been unfolding intermittently for a while, and has venerable roots in earlier generations — the debate over what is meant by “secular Judaism” has been heating up. In God-centered understandings of Judaism (or “Jewishness,” if you prefer), the commitment of large numbers of Jews to social justice derives directly from…
Like many American Jews I know — and like almost all New Yorkers — I find Christmas in Manhattan deeply evocative. I like the smell of Christmas trees and candied nuts, and I like the way Central Park twinkles, and I like the red-and-white holiday markets that pop up like sukkahs all around the city….
‘Secular” is to “Jew” as “holy” is to “Torah,” as “noisy” is to “grogger,” as “crotchety” is to “Larry David.” Which is another way of saying that this coupling of adjective and noun sounds logical, natural and familiar. Could the same be said of a shiduch on the order of “secular Southern Baptist,” or “secular…
Guidebooks bill Tel Aviv as a city that never sleeps. But accessing all that Israel’s most cosmopolitan city has to offer — from art galleries to jazz clubs to discotheques — can prove tricky one day a week. That’s because public city buses stop running at sundown Friday and don’t start rolling again until nightfall…
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