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Virtual Talmud

I agree with Rabbi Waxman that we must be proactive in working towards strengthening the relationships between our various Jewish movements to facilitate closer cooperation and deeper respect within the Jewish community here and in Israel. However, I also agree with Rabbi Stern that we need to more actively cultivate a dialogue with the Muslim…

I appreciate Rabbi Stern’s insightful and eloquent plea for the American Jewish community to make a concerted effort to begin building bridges to the Muslim world and to the American Muslim community in particular. It certainly is one of the gravest areas we need to address as we do a communal cheshbon ha-nefesh (spiritual accounting)…

If there is one thing Rosh Hashanah teaches us, it is the importance of self-reflection and the ability to be self-critical in the way we relate to one another. Communally speaking, as we enter the High Holidays the American Jewish community would do well to reflect on the sad state of Muslim-Jewish relations and the…

Before I get shrill about Christiane Amanpour’s “God’s Warriors” let me just put a few things on the table: I am vehemently opposed to the continuation of the Israeli settler project. I find those Jews who live in Hebron to be detrimental to Israel’s security and moral stature. In general I like Christine Amanpour reporting.…

Honest Reporting gives Christiane Amanpour and CNN a C- for her reporting of the six-hour series “God’s Warriors,” in which she looks at religious fundamentalism in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. However, I would give her and her producers an F. As a former journalist myself, I am not sure what upset me more: Amanpour playing…

Rabbi Grossman suggests that “The kosher laws are supposed to raise an awareness of what we eat and a sensitivity to the needs of all living creatures.” Interesting, because just like Jews have claimed that eco-kosher is a central tenet of Judaism, Christians also have made the exact same argument about Christianity. And I bet…

The kosher laws are supposed to raise an awareness of what we eat and a sensitivity to the needs of all living creatures–that is why the disconnect between kashrut and the humane treatment of animals is so discordant to Jewish values. However, eco-kosher is not only an issue of demanding humane kosher slaughtering, as Rabbi…

For thousands of years, Judaism has taken seriously the idea of “you are what you eat”-– in other words, that the choices we make about what food to eat (and not to eat) has the capacity to make us holy. This is the origin of ancient Jewish dietary laws, known collectively as kashrut. Rabbi Zalman…

That there is a need to convene the sort of conference called “Why Be Jewish” that Rabbi Stern recently did points to precisely how poor a job the institutional Jewish world has done at providing meaningful answers to why we should care about being Jewish. Too often the answer is posed merely in terms of…

There are many reasons to be Jewish: religious reasons, family reasons, emotional reasons, communal and historic reasons. Rabbi Stern’s summary of a conference he co-hosted for the Bronfman Foundation came up with four good answers to the question “Why Be Jewish?” The only problem with his answers is the avoidance of one critical three-letter word:…
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