Jack Nash, a hedge fund pioneer and important Jewish philanthropist, passed away yesterday at the age of 79. Mr. Nash was one of the founders of the New York Sun and the newspaper published an editorial today in his memory. After the jump, I’ve pasted an email that Nigel Savage of Hazon just sent out, [...]

When Barack Obama met with members of the Democratic Caucus to speak about his tour of the Middle East, he had a feeling. “Nobody said this to me directly, but I get the feeling from my talks that if the sanctions don’t work, Israel is going to strike Iran,” Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, [...]

In Black Orthodox hip-hop M.C. Y-Love’s song State of the Nation, he reels off statistics gleaned from the National Jewish Population Survey. After listing the number of Jews who become Orthodox, change their last names, and buy trees from JNF, he lets loose with the line: “One out of 44 looks like me.” He’s talking [...]

Chabad is nothing if not well-organized. Each year, they release a set of uniform lesson plans to literally hundreds of tiny synagogues, learning groups, and D.I.Y. rabbis, covering holidays, the Jewish life cycle, texts, and other little nuggets of information…basically, it’s like Hebrew School for adults. Or, really, anyone who shows up. As part of [...]

What a waste of a pickle. Probably a full sour too, by the looks of it:

That’s the title of the original post from Nosson Slifkin, the Zoo Rabbi, and it’s hard not to use — that is, after all, what happens in the clip below. But I don’t understand why Rabbi Slifkin’s website, ZooTorah, isn’t visited by everyone in the world — it’s so interesting, and it’s so weird. His [...]

The story of Barack Obama’s stolen Western Wall note — and its subsequent publication in Ma’ariv — is interesting for many reasons. Not least of which is the implication that Jewish laws were in some way violated when Obama’s prayer was published in the newspaper. Last week, the kotel’s resident rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, criticized [...]

JTA reporter Jacob Berkman, who was himself the subject of these pages a few weeks ago, today reported that Michael “Mickey” Ross, a former producer of All in the Family and Three’s Company, is leaving his fortune to Jewish studies departments and endowing a Yiddish chair at the City College of New York. But Ross’s [...]

We know that just about everyone who comes to MyJewishLearning.com is looking for Jewish answers, in some way. Answers to questions on a variety of topics about Judaism, but answers no less. And answers that they could often get from other sources–books, classes, and most obviously Jewish scholars and rabbis. With the growing number of [...]

Today’s New York Times ran an article about Cuil a new search engine started by a bunch of former Google staffers. Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages [...]