Features

 Q - Is it ethical to download and share current movies, songs and articles without paying for them?

It's hard to find a justification for the free use of video or music that people should be paying for. There's a reason they call it "piracy." But it all comes down to drawing the line between sharing and stealing.

A group of Jewish runners jog a few miles in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park every Wednesday night for their health. On July 28, they were joined by a few dozen more runners on a  much longer route. For someone else’s health.

Sixty runners, all men, took part in the first 200K (20 kilometers is 12.4 miles) relay race from Brooklyn to upstate Sullivan County, sponsored by the newly formed JRunners organization. The participants raised more than $100, 000 for the medical expenses of a neighbor of a JRunners founder who has ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.

Two weeks ago, when Andrew Gordon, 39, was the third contestant voted off this season of CBS’s “Big Brother,” his last words were, “’Captain Kosher’ out.”    

Gordon, a yarmulke-wearing podiatrist from Miami Beach, joined the reality show in June with his eyes on the $500,000 prize, but also with the goal of demonstrating to his 9-year-old daughter that you can do anything in life and still be a good Jew. 

I had a pretty typical summer for a recently graduated high school senior: working, going to the beach and catching up with friends and family. Perhaps more unusual was that I recently returned from a two-week program in China and I am preparing to leave on August 29th to spend the year on Young Judea Year Course in Israel.

When Jewish communal leaders learn that yet another Jew has made a multimillion dollar donation to a cultural institution like Lincoln Center or a large university, the response has long been, “another one has been lost to the Jews.” 

When my husband Michael and I packed a bag to bring up to visiting day at the kids’ sleep-away camp, we threw in the super soaker Jacob had requested, the light-up yo-yo Sophie asked for, and a pair of nail clippers. What we really should have packed was a tub of sheep dip for boys, and our industrial strength tolerance for apathy.

On the first of this month, just as my vacation was beginning, the New York Times published (on its front page!) an article about the phenomenon of “clergy burnout.” I was, of course, touched by the fact that they had timed the publishing of the article to coincide with the o

Even though the Kibbutzim College of Education Technology & the Arts has been training teachers in Israel for seven decades it is not widely known on our shores.

Founded by the kibbutz movement in 1939, it serves 3,300 students at its campus in Tel Aviv.

The college chairman, Hagai Meirom, recently held a reception at the home of Israeli Consul General Asaf Shariv in New York to draw attention to the accomplishments of the teachers college.

Three leading Modern Orthodox rabbis and personal teachers of mine (Nathaniel Helfgot, Aryeh Klapper, and Yitzchak Blau) recently released a statement of principles on how Orthodoxy can and must relate to homosexuals in our community.