Last month, I went to the bris of a colleague’s newborn son, and I was reminded how difficult these lifecycle rituals are for me. Gathering friends and family to welcome a child into the community is, of course, a lovely thing.
But the all-too-chipper mohel, cracking jokes, scalpel in hand, in front of a table […]

A very interesting letter to the editor in this week’s Jewish Week raises a fascinating question: With gay and lesbian students now accepted into Conservative rabbinical schools, what will be the movement’s next “big issue”?
David Londy — a Reform rabbi — thinks he knows:
Instead of being innovative, the movement and the Seminary seem only reactive, […]

As promised, here’s a link to my Jerusalem Post write-up of this year’s South By Southwest music festival, with a special look at Jewish/Israeli bands.

Here are some great sites to get your kids or students excited about Passover.

Babaganewz has a terrific magic trick, fun seder games, ecards (frogs and locusts!), Passover Jewpardy, mad libs, a memory game, a video game, a Darfur reading, and the four questions in many languages.
ChabadKids offers a How To Passover feature, as well as […]

This month’s issue of Commentary includes a lengthy essay by Meir Soloveichik, in which he rejects theological interfaith dialogue. Soloveichik supports the attempts to improve interfaith relations, but suggests these interactions be limited to the social realm.
In this, Soloveichik reaffirms the position of his great-uncle, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik — the most influential figure in 20th […]

Throughout the month of March we’ve been highlighting Jewish Women’s Archive’s This Week in History, a unique feature that highlights the accomplishments of American Jewish women.
Jewish Women’s History month may be coming to an end, but the learning is just beginning.
Sign up for your own weekly This Week in History emails from JWA.

The fourth issue of Guilt & Pleasure is now out, and at first glance, it seems as good (and good-looking) as the first three. That is, unless you’re Shalom Auslander’s mother.
The journal has a hilarious — but fundamentally serious — essay by Auslander that explores a predicament many of us are in: struggling with the […]

Big news from the West Coast. The University of Judaism and the Brandeis-Bardin Institute are merging and forming a new entity: the American Jewish University.
LA’s Jewish Journal reports:
The University of Judaism (UJ) and Brandeis-Bardin Institute (BBI), two Southern California institutions that for the last 60 years have educated and inspired Jews of all ages and […]

David Klinghoffer’s latest assault on liberalism — published on Jewcy.com — is an attempt to frame liberalism in terms of materialism and materialism in terms of the biblical idea of tumah, ritual impurity.
The piece is particularly shoddy, especially when he goes through specific liberal positions and tries to articulate how they are functions of this […]

The Forward’s got the scoop on novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s next writing projects. The first is a continuation to his vegetarian activism:
Over the course of 2006, Foer spoke to specialists in biology, farming, ethics and nutrition as he drove around America visiting farms of all shapes, sizes and smells, those ranging from the small-scale organic […]