The Jewish Week | Opinion

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.

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.

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.”

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.