JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Like most people, I thought I would be happy to return to normal this summer. I was grateful to be gathering with family to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday in person. I enjoyed eating in restaurants again and making travel plans instead of sanitizing my groceries. But underneath that initial elation, as I stored my…
When I arrived at the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana earlier this summer, a staff member handed me a card with a photo of a statue of a young girl wearing a yellow dress. A quote on the back of the card explained that before this girl, Carlyle Stewart, was freed at the age of seven,…
It was the summer of 1967. Wearing some flowers in your hair. Free music in the park. Acid trips. Haight-Ashbury. The Monterey Pop Festival. “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” And it was also 50 years ago today, “Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.” A half-century ago, the Beatles released the soundtrack to the…
“Homosexuality, Human Dignity and Halakhah” was approved by the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS) on December 6, 2006, representing a watershed moment for the Conservative Movement. Rigorous scholarship, moral clarity and rabbinic courage provided a compassionate religious response to a complex matter, epitomizing the ethical and redemptive power of halakhah. However,…
It’s 5777, and it’s time to change the conversation about Kapparot. Next week, in the day or two before we observe Yom Kippur, we’ll hear about or participate in the long-standing Jewish folk tradition that attracts explosive debate over its use of live chickens: Kapparot, or Kapporos, a ritual practiced by some Jews in which…
(JTA) — There was the convert who was barred from a synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Jamaican convert whose boyfriend’s rabbi offered him a coveted synagogue honor if only he’d dump her, the grandmother who told her granddaughter she’d be going to hell because she became a Jew. The road to conversion can be long…
The Rabbinical Council of America has formed a committee to review its conversion process in the wake of the arrest on voyeurism charges of one of its leading conversion rabbis. The RCA announced Wednesday the men and women appointed to a committee to review its current Geirus Protocol and Standards conversion process and suggest safeguards…
In the wake of voyeurism allegations against a prominent Orthodox rabbi, the head of an Orthodox yeshiva for women is arguing that male rabbis needn’t be present for a female convert’s ritual immersion. Rabbi Jeffrey Fox, the Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivat Maharat in New York, is preparing a teshuva, or Jewish legal opinion, arguing that…
