The Jewish Week | Opinion

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 |

When it comes to addressing the Israeli/Palestinian relationship, it is time for the American Jewish community to take Hillel’s injunction, a pragmatic progenitor of The Golden Rule, more seriously. By challenging ourselves to examine our words and actions from the perspective of “the Other” we might be better equipped to act with the compassion God demands of us.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 | | Special To The Jewish Week

Last Sunday afternoon, I was wheeled into an operating room in Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikva, an anesthesiologist said laila tov, and a surgeon removed my left kidney, which was brought to an adjoining operating room and put into the abdomen of a twenty-three year old Israeli dental student from Georgia, FSU, whom I met for the first time three months ago.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 | | Special To The Jewish Week

The recent exchange of accusations between Mel Gibson and Joe Eszterhas, the screenwriter hired to write a Judah Maccabee biopic that Gibson would direct, brings renewed attention to the very fact that Gibson has been planning to make such a movie in the first place. Let’s ask him not to.

Macabees, Mel Gibson
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 | | Special To The Jewish Week

Unlike with other Jewish holidays, the Torah does not specify a date for Shavuot; it is celebrated on the 50th day (seven weeks) after Passover. We moderns celebrate Shavuot on the sixth day of the month of Sivan (this year, May 27-28).

Equally strange, the actual date on which the Torah was given is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. We know more or less when it was, but no exact date is given. This is true even though the dates of many other events, all surely of far lesser importance, are written explicitly in the Torah.

Shavuot
Sunday, May 20, 2012 |

This is why the Internet asifa (the large-scale rally, planned by haredim against the Internet, which took place on Sunday night at Citi Field) is important for K’lal Yisroel: because a wholesome lie is better than any broken truth; because denial must be protected at all costs; because ignorance is sacred in a world whose existence depends on it.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 | | Special To The Jewish Week

An annual ritual begins snow and runs through mid-June: approximately 100,000 Jewish students will be donning mortar boards and gowns and accepting diplomas on more than 500 colleges and universities across our continent.

graduation
Tuesday, May 15, 2012 | | Special To The Jewish Week

In January, I read an article that has been bothering me until now. 

In his Jan. 3 column, “Why Funders Need to Embrace Failure,” Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of The Jewish Week, described a project called The Israel Experience, which was launched in 1992 to bring tens of thousands of Jewish teens to Israel for eight-week summer programs, as “an acknowledged failure.”

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 | | Special To The Jewish Week

An unfortunate local controversy involving the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and the former leadership of the Newberger Hillel at the University of Chicago has attracted widespread attention. Some of the commentary has cast the issue as setting a stodgy, anachronistic establishment up against creative, exciting innovation (“Are We Overly Invested In Bricks And Mortar?” Editor’s column, May 4).

Monday, May 14, 2012 | | Special to the Jewish Week

 

The Conservative Movement is in crisis.

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism estimates that from 1985 to 2009, 175 affiliated congregations have dispersed or merged with other denominations. The movement’s branch of day schools, the Solomon Schechter schools, has had the sharpest enrollment decline out of any denominational schools with a 3.8 percent decrease from 2010 to 2011, and since 1998, 20 Conservative day schools have shut down nationwide.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 | | Special To The Jewish Week

Back in the 1950’s, Orthodoxy was descendant with many predicting its demise.