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Virtual Talmud

I can go on for pages about how important a day-school education is toward ensuring the continuity of the Jewish people. Likewise, I could spend hours explaing how critical Jewish literacy is for Jewish life. There are no issues more dear to my heart than the importance of Jewish education and literacy. But then I…

Thirty years ago (way before the 2000 National Population Survey shocked everyone with its intermarriage figures rising above 50 percent), a group of forward-thinking Jewish educators charged the Jewish community with devoting significantly more resources to Jewish education and improving its quality. They founded the Coalition for Alternatives in Jewish Education (CAJE) hoping that creative…

This past summer in Israel, on a long walk to a friend’s house for Shabbat dinner, I passed groups of young people hanging around street corners. Looking through the lit windows of Germantown’s cafes, I saw numerous individuals sitting alone at tables. This was Jerusalem, not secular Tel Aviv. What had happened to the family…

The Jewish press in America and Israel is abuzz about the recent comments of Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua to the effect that Jewish life in the Disapora (outside of Israel) is incomplete and irrelevant. The substance of the charges is nothing new–for 150 years, Zionist theoreticians have been espousing a concept called shelilat ha-galut, the…

The recent spat at the American Jewish Committee‘s conference in Washington is what happens when you get a lot of Jews in one room who really do not know that much about Jews or Judaism. The debacle happened on the first night of the conference during a panel moderated by Ted Koppel featuring among others…

Sadly, the story is all too common–Jewish families trying to outdo each other with over-the-top Bar and Bat Mitzvah parties that show off wealth and status in an orgy of conspicuous consumption. For some it seems it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that bling. This is just the type of excess which…

When our son Yoni was 12, he begged us for a Bar Mitzvah disco party like all his classmates were planning. He was not initially pleased when we replied with plans for a Saturday night largely home-cooked dinner and talent show for out-of-town guests and a Sunday “Olympiad” in the backyard with relay races and…

“Keeping up with the Steins,” the new movie set to hit theaters shortly, is one of those cultural events that remind you just how different your Judaism is from your grandparents’ Judaism. The story revolves around a family preparing for the Bar Mitzvah of their son. But this is not your Zaydee’s shindig. A Bar…

Perhaps no issue is more misunderstood within the context of halakhah, Jewish law, than gay marriage. On the one hand, those such as my friend and teacher Rabbi David Ellenson, President of Hebrew Union College, has radically argued that “a tradition that demands ‘You shall do that which is upright and good’ can surely be…

One of the core precepts of Reconstructionist thought is that Judaism is always evolving in response to times and circumstances–and thank God for that! If Judaism had remained static, then our religion would have died out 1,900 years ago when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and we could no longer offer sacrifice. It is…
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