Last week, over 100 Orthodox rabbis around the world added their signatures to a declaration condemning a recent event that the media identified as an “same-sex Orthodox wedding.” On November 6, Yeshiva University-ordained Rabbi Steven Greenberg, known to many as the…
Fear & Loathing in Washington Heights
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 Rupp answers a common question about Judaism and science
Question: “Rabbi, I’m a cultural Jew; I support the US-Israel relationship, and I am proud to be Jewish. But let’s be honest, I believe that by now we can rely on science as the best way to explain our world.”…
The Libel Law: a threat to Israeli democracy?
by Joshua Friedlander “Democracy Under Attack” screamed the webpage of Ha’aretz – a popular, left-leaning Israeli broadsheet last week. The event prompting the headline was a proposed alteration to the wording of the Libel Law, submitted this month to the Knesset…
Bil’in Celebrates “Friday of Loyalty to the Martyrs”
For the past six years, villagers and international activists have convened in the village of Bil’in to protest the presence of Israel’s security barrier. The inhabitants of Bil’in, which lies just west of Ramallah and about ofur kilometers east of…
Split Syria: Assad, the Arab League, & the Jewish State
by Adam J. Deutsch Over the last eight months, nonviolent protests have erupted across Syria; while the central regions including Homs and Hama have been particular hotbeds of revolution for organized youth, protesters have also gathered in the suburbs of…
The New Face of Instantaneity: how Twitter describes our world
by Joshua Friedlander Just the other week, New York cops cleared out hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district. There was a feeling among the protesters that the movement had come of age, that at last…
I Am a Militant Man: a poem by Joshua Melamed
I am a militant man, because I have been conditioned to be a militant man. I never asked to have the urge to wield a weapon, to want to delve into battle, to gallop terribly against my fellow man. I…
Palestinian ‘freedom riders’: the protest we’ve been waiting for?
Israeli police have detained six Palestinians dubbed West Bank Freedom Riders who boarded a Jerusalem-bound bus used by Jewish settlers. The activists say they drew inspiration from 1960s US civil rights demonstrators who campaigned under the same name against segregated…
Obituary: Nosson Tzvi Finkel (1943-2011)
By Joshua Friedlander The passing of elderly rabbis is a fairly regular, if unhappy, event in Jerusalem; but few of them as wide a ripple across the Jewish world as that of Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, rosh yeshiva (dean) of…