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Virtual Talmud

The other night my friend, Jewish media guru Steven I. Weiss, asked me to go with him to hear Bernard Henri Levy’s State of World Jewry lecture at the 92nd street Y in Manhattan. Levy can be very entertaining and so I decided to join him for the lecture. Perhaps the most comical part of…

I share with the Beliefnet community a message I sent to my congregation last night: The escalating violence in Israel has not escaped anybody’s notice over the past week, beginning with the killing of a Sderot resident by a Hamas-launched rocket, and continuing with responses and counter-responses that have caused great suffering and loss of…

A Palestinian gunmen today walked into Merkaz Harav Yeshiva gunning down eight boys in the middle of prayers. This horrible act of terror is but another sad chapter in this 60-year war. Yet, it represents an emerging trend in the sorry state of relations between Palestinians and Israelis–one based in the house of study. As…

We took up the question of the Conservative Movement’s Hecksher Tzedek a few months back and I am glad Rabbi Grossman brought it up again. At the time I was taken aback by the negative comments that some had posted opposing Hecksher Tzedek as an attempt to foist non-Jewish (ie, contemporary liberal American) values onto…

If the term ‘kosher’ means fit, or done right, is the food we eat ‘kosher” if it’s produced using unethical practices? What if it meets all other technical requirements? Conservative Rabbi Morris Allen says, “no”. For Rabbi Allen, it is not enough to be concerned about the ritual specifics of the kosher food we eat…

Rabbi Stern is right to protest that we should not be judging someone on their religious affiliation. However, he is wrong to uncritically pass along the very information that has been circulating in anti-Obama email smears. If Rabbi Stern had checked out his sources, he would have discovered that the right wing articles he cites…

The attempt to depict Barack Obama as a Muslim and the response of the Jewish community are depressing on a number of levels. First off, even if he was a Muslim, since when does that disqualify someone from office? Have I missed something here? Why on earth has the reaction of the American Jewish community…

Sen. Barack Obama has shown himself to be a strong friend of Israel, as Florida Congressman Robert Wexler makes clear in a recent Jerusalem Post article. Obama also made his position clear in the most recent debate in Cleveland this past week, reiterating he is a stalwart friend of Israel whose security he believes is…

With the Republican nomination all but wrapped up, whatever attention Americans still have left for politics turns to the Democratic nomination, where Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are both still viable contenders. Despite Obama’s recent momentum, it’s far too early to count Clinton out; she has shown herself to be a resourceful and relentless campaigner…

I found Rabbi Stern’s analysis of the economy as a faith-based institution interesting. It cast Alan Greenspan’s (now Ben Bernanke’s) cryptic musings about future conditions in a new light: the high priest of economics reciting just the right words (and perhaps sacrificing a goat) to attain the desired economic outcome. Faith and the economy is…
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