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...
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...
By Sarah Posner The time has passed when one person can speak for the entire community. When Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, announced he would retire in 2015, the inevitable speculation about who might succeed him quickly yielded to consensus: Foxman, who...
By Konstanty Gebert. Over the past few years, a series of books has brought to the attention of English-speaking readers the morally challenging, historically important and often overlooked or forgotten story of the Polish contribution to the Allied war effort in World War II, and...
By Mark Oppenheimer // Fewer and fewer American religious groups practice endogamy today....
By Naomi Ragen // Several high-profile Israeli rabbis have come under fire for less-than-holy schemes. ...
By Letty Cottin Pogrebin There are many reasons not to give to the homeless, but we should do it anyway. When I was young, it was axiomatic among radical leftists that one should resist the humanitarian impulse to give to beggars because handouts “postpone the Revolution.” Only...
A political “big tent” would be better for Washington, DC's Theater J and everyone else. // By Marshall Breger...
By Diane M. Bolz Maimonides Illuminated One of the finest and most elaborate illuminated Hebrew manuscripts in existence is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The extremely rare 15th-century handwritten and illustrated copy of medieval philosopher Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah was...