The winds of scandal were blowing in full force across the Jewish world last week. An article printed in an online publication run by Yeshiva University students became the centre of controversy, and the school demanded that the article be removed.…
Rabbi Chaim Addresses Trends In Jewish Academic Success
“Parents’ Weekend at UCLA” revealed many of the intimate details of Jewish life on campus. One of these details was the extent to which our leadership takes note of our involvement and progress within the greater UCLA community. On Friday…
Halloween and Judaism: a contradiction or a coalition?
Halloween—the night of disguised merriment and childhood dreams. The night where it doesn’t matter if you were an all-star on your high school baseball team, genius enough to discover the theory of relativity, or had the body of an angel—you…
Plaskow’s feminist theology lacks one thing — Theology
Welcome back to Steiner’s Two Cents — the section in which I probe the interaction between feminism and Judaism as it is filtered through traditional text. Last week, I assessed Moshe Meiselman’s “Jewish Woman in Jewish Law,” which, in my opinion,…
Jewish Ideals Stand Strong Amidst Occupy Wall Street Anti-Semitism
What began on September 17th, 2011 at Zuccotti Park in New York City as a protest against purportedly greedy Wall Street executives has become a global mutiny of epic proportions. As of October 20th, demonstrators in nearly one thousand cities…
The Jewish Vote, Reappraised
With the coverage of the election season saturating nearly every media outlet, we cannot escape discussion of partisan politics. Politicians from across the board are working long and hard to earn your vote. They’re assembling teams of image consultants, speechwriters,…
Meiselman Revisited: reflections on Orthodox feminist literature
Meiselman’s 1978 book Recently, during my never-ending search for relevant information for my senior thesis, which explores recent feminist and queer Jewish theology, I happened upon Moshe Meiselman’s Jewish Woman in Jewish Law, an early traditional Jewish response to feminism. …
Surfing for Peace: How One Man Has Made a Difference
“Surfboard diplomacy” is not a term we often find amidst the sound bytes and jargon used to deliver the Middle East news. For Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, however, it’s a term that guides his vision of the Middle East. The self-proclaimed, “first…
Matisyahu and the Nine Days
I wrote this post yesterday as an introduction to my coverage of the Matisyahu concert: Today is my sister’s birthday, and a few days ago, her friends and I decided to celebrate by taking her to a Matisyahu concert. Only…