How America Got Its (Bus) Wheels Back
The story of how discount curbside buses have transformed the nature of intercity travel. With a detour to rabbinical court. And a 15-minute rest stop....
Saturday, November 17, 2018
religion Tag
Book Review // The Story of the Jews
The great Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who died in 2009, famously declared that history was “the faith of fallen Jews.” Yerushalmi had trained under the preeminent 20th-century Jewish historian Salo Baron, whose epic (and unfinished) 18-volume A Social and Religious History of the Jews...
Jewish Routes // Arizona
Defying stereotypes, early Jewish pioneers in Arizona were not just storeowners and bankers, but cowboys, lawmen, ranchers and entertainers. The first known Jewish settler was the German-born Nathan Benjamin Appel, who headed west in 1856 from New York to St. Louis, then followed the Santa...
Opinion // “I Want To Serve, But…”
Naomi Ragen Fear of ostracism—not lack of conviction—prevents some haredi men from enlisting. A day before the haredi “million man march” called to protest the new drafting of yeshiva students, I sat in my synagogue in Jerusalem’s German Colony as Rabbi Benny Lau got up to speak....
Symposium // Can Religious Pluralism and an Official Rabbinate Coexist in Israel?
Moment asks a wide range of scholars, activists and religious leaders to suggest if and how religious pluralism and the chief rabbinate can coexist...
Visual Moment // Persian Jewish Art
Illuminating the History of Iranian Jews By Diane M. Bolz [dropcap]J[/dropcap]ews have lived in Persia, now Iran, for nearly three millennia. The first Jewish community dates back to the early 6th century BCE, when the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judea and exiled many of its inhabitants....
Book Review // Little Failure: A memoir by Gary Shteyngart
The title, Little Failure, is of course ironic. By now, after Gary Shteyngart’s three best-selling comic novels, many travel articles and dozens of interviews—in which he rarely gives a straight answer—his Russian Jewish immigrant parents must have forgiven him for not becoming the lawyer or...
The Secret History of X & O
An Investigation Into the Religious Roots of the Symbols for Hugs & Kisses // I grew up in a family wary of anything overtly Christian. My father transformed the expression “cross your fingers” into “star your fingers” because, as he used to explain, crosses are...
James Kugel: Professor of Disbelief
When I was a teenager, there was a legend repeated in the Jewish schools of my hometown. If you somehow manage to get into godless Harvard, don’t go. But if, against your rosh yeshiva and rebbe’s advice, you actually go, whatever you do, don’t take...
Ask the Rabbis // Contraception
INDEPENDENT Judaism does not restrict a woman in regard to her choices concerning pregnancy. She has a choice to bear children or not to bear children (Talmud Bav’li, Yevamot 65b; Mahar’shal in Yam Shel Shlomo 1:8). The injunction to “Be fruitful and multiply,” the ancient rabbis...