The appearance of President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is both a plus and a minus for the upcoming General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America, taking place in Washington, D.C., Nov. 8-10. The plus, of course,...- Read Story -
All new administrations, confronting a world far more complex than campaign rhetoric admits, make mistakes in the international arena. A critical measure of success is how well they learn from their early errors and use that to craft more effective policies.- Read Story -
Persistence is a critical ingredient in effective political advocacy, a fact the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish groups have learned well.- Read Story -
The first long-term study of the impact Birthright Israel has had on participants who made the trip five to eight years ago was released this week and bears thoughtful review and discussion. (See story, page 1)...- Read Story -
I told Rich Cohen the other night that his latest book, “Israel Is Real: An Obsessive Quest to Understand the Jewish Nation and its History,” should be a must-read for a young generation of American Jews, many of whom, unfortunately, have little interest in learning about the history of Israel.- Read Story -
Just before my mother, Rebbetzin Esther Friedlander Rosenblatt, was to return home to Annapolis, Md., at the end of the recent Sukkot holiday, after spending a family-filled week with us, my daughter took her aside. She told Mom that the baby she was expecting any day was a boy, and that she and her husband planned to name him for my late father. - Read Story -
The only thing surprising about the decision last week of a distinguished Ivy League university press to, in effect, censor a key element of a book about censorship is how predictable the result was.- Read Story -
Think of the American Jewish community as a business — a more than $10 billion annual business. If our organizations and leaders made programming decisions based on that notion, perhaps they would be building a stronger, larger and more effective Jewish community.- Read Story -
Oranim, the largest trip provider for Birthright Israel, accounting for about 25 percent of the participants, left the fold over the summer.- Read Story -
This year marks the 71st anniversary of Kristallnacht and, given the age of the survivors, we will not be marking many more anniversaries with them. Kristallnacht is referred to by history, deceptively, almost poetically,...- Read Story -
We rabbis are all well aware of the controversy surrounding that report, its original charter and the track record towards Israel of the U.N. Human Rights Council that appointed the Goldstone Commission. But as we told the embassy official we met with, the furor over the commission's existence and Judge Goldstone's role in leading it has obscured some important recommendations to examine possible human rights abuses. ...- Read Story -
In “Eating Animals,” Joanthan Safran Foer’s remarkable new book, he describes what has happened to the way we raise animals for food in our country. With wit and power Foer lays out before us what it means to consign billions (yes, billions) of animals to horrific suffering so we can eat the antibiotic laden meat and feed it to our children.- Read Story -
Judaism so treasures words one might think you could get a righteous person out of a book. Yet beginning with the Bible, Judaism taught that laws come to life in people. Role models speak louder than rules.- Read Story -
One Shabbat morning a few years ago I decided to skip shul and head over to a friend’s apartment for coffee. I didn’t time my visit well.- Read Story -
Like many homeowners, I live in a house with a front door I seldom use. Good friends and groceries come in through the side door, nearest the driveway. Only my mother, rickety with age but undiminished in drive, preferred the formality of the front door. And though I grumbled about moving the random matter that accumulated there between her visits, I never minded the sense of order I felt afterwards. That I privately drew a sort of sustenance from it was something I didn’t understand until, just before her 97th birthday, she was suddenly gone.- Read Story -
