America Needs a Kosher Diner

by Cole S. Aronson

Diners teach us that our kind of people isn’t the center of the universe. Continue Reading »

30 Sep 2021

Friendship After COVID

by Erica Brown

To those friends who were present for me during this long and tedious separation, I hope to say one day soon: Come near that we may make a blessing on each other. Continue Reading »

5 Jan 2021

“Heaven and Everything Else”

by Shalom Carmy

I first read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man less than twenty years after its publication. It was already a classic among readers who cherished the few works of Jewish thought written in artful, eloquent English for a literate audience. Heschel summoned . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Apr 2019

Boy on the Temple Roof

by Shalom Carmy

Young Rabbi Binder has opened the floor for a “free discussion” period at the afternoon Hebrew school housed in the synagogue, where the minimal Jewish education he dispenses to postwar Jewish boys is a prerequisite for their bar mitzvah ritual. As usual, most of the kids are indifferent, even . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Mar 2019

After Pittsburgh

by Shalom Carmy

One evening in the late 1960s, the students gathered in Yeshiva University’s major study hall to learn Talmud were treated instead to a speech by Rabbi Aharon ­Lichtenstein, the young director of the advanced graduate rabbinic program. The topic was the struggle of Soviet Jews to emigrate. Unlike . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 2019

“Teach Torah and Fight for Justice”

by Shalom Carmy

In Jewish law, tikkun olam means improving the world. It refers to several rabbinic enactments of the first and second centuries of the Common Era intended to improve the functioning of certain social institutions. The ancient Aleinu prayer, originating in the Rosh Hashanah . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Dec 2018

The Rav

by Mark Gottlieb

Twenty-five years ago this past April (20 Nisan 5753), thousands of Jews, their affiliations ranging across and beyond denominational lines, boarded buses for the Maimonides School in Brookline, Massachusetts. There, they paid their final respects to a figure known to his students and . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Nov 2018

Why Does Religion Need Commandments?

by Reuven Ziegler

What is the point of the myriad commandments governing every aspect of a Jew’s life?  Continue Reading »

9 Apr 2018

Rethinking Theology and Matter with Ibn Gabirol

by Stephen H. Webb

Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1021–1058) was the first Jewish philosopher in Spain, but medieval Christians knew him only by his Latinized name, Avicebron, and they assumed that he was either a Christian or a Muslim. Most scholastics also thought he was a deeply misguided thinker. Gabirol was identified with the doctrine of universal hylomorphism—the idea that everything God creates is composed of form and matter—and treated as a precursor of the nominalist emphasis on the absolute freedom (and thus inscrutability) of God’s will. Some of his poetry remains in liturgical use in Judaism to this day, but his philosophy was all but forgotten. Even experts in medieval theology typically treat him as little more than a footnote to scholastic debates about how angels can be individuated without being embodied. Continue Reading »

27 Apr 2015

Global Anti-Semitism?

by Edward S. Shapiro

Last May, the Anti-Defamation League made the start­ling pronouncement that one-quarter of the world’s population is anti-Semitic. The source for that charge was the ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism, a comprehensive survey of international populations sponsored by the ADL and . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 2015