This past Sunday, the president of New York University issued a mass e-mail apology to students and staff. The day after Yom Kippur might sound like a sensible day for issuing apologies, but the question is whether John Sexton actually needed to make a Mea Culpa. You see, this official apology to the entire university…
In the summer of 1998 I was a madrich (Hebrew for counselor) on the Michigan Teen Mission to Israel. This was the second teen Israel trip coordinated by the Metropolitan Detroit’s Jewish Federation. I helped lead a bus of Conservative Jewish teens from Congregation Shaarey Zedek and we traveled through Israel with a bus of teens…
I work as the rabbi at a Jewish summer camp. We have eighty campers from Israel join us each summer. Many of these young campers, like most Israelis, are not familiar with liberal, alternative forms of religious expression in Judaism. In Israel, Judaism is black and white. You either do it or you don’t –…
A 2004 article in the Jewish Daily Forward proclaimed that “Hebrew National became the unchallenged king of the kosher meat industry by marketing its product to non-Jews with the help of several catchy advertising slogans, including the famous, ‘We answer to a higher authority.’ But its success masked a bizarre twist: Most kosher consumers won’t…
Cross-posted at Jewish Techs What do Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg, blogger Emily Gould, and the 10th-11th century scholar Rabbeinu Gershom have in common? They all articulated their views about privacy. Zuckerberg was criticized last month for Facebook’s new privacy settings. Over 500 million worldwide users of Facebook had more of their information made public because…
If BP was trying to make a Jewish connection to the oil spill off the Louisiana coast, they got it all wrong. Yesterday marked the 49th day of the BP oil spill. Perhaps BP was going for the Hanukkah story connection, which is “The Oil lasted for 8 days.” Instead, BP got confused with the…
Like many rabbis, when I encounter an article about “Jewish life” in the mainstream press, I ask myself the age-old question: Is this good or bad for the Jews? And that is precisely what I did yesterday when I read about the bar mitzvah party that is to take place at Yankee Stadium this June…
Listening to the Torah reading on Shemini Atzeret this past Shabbat morning, my attention was focused on the hungry. One might think that it would have been on Yom Kippur that my attention was on the hungry as I spent the day fasting. However, I couldn’t help but think of those human beings without enough…
During my first year of rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, my Talmud teacher, Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner (right), came to me for some consultation. He knew I was tech savvy and interested in the Internet. It was 1998 and, as a member of the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (“the…
Rabbi Avi Shafran (right) never ceases to amaze me. He is the director of public affairs of Agudath Israel of America and the unofficial spokesman for Orthodox Judaism. Shafran is skilled, yet dangerous, with the pen. He has made a career out of writing op-ed pieces that defend Orthodoxy and delegitimize the non-Orthodox. His latest…