“It is hard to do justice to the originality of men who, in the eighth century BCE, untutored by the horrors of two world wars with poison gas and atom bombs, and without the frightening prospect of still more fearful weapons of destruction, insisted that war is evil and must some day be abolished, and [...]

Here at MJL we are very proud of our frequent contributor and generally awesome friend Leah Koenig, whose cookbook, The Hadassah Everyday Cookbook: Daily Meals for the Contemporary Jewish Kitchen is coming out on March 8th. We have a copy here in the office, so I can say with authority that the book is drop-dead [...]

If you’ve been to a few different Torah services you’ve probably noticed that everyone who chants from the Torah has their own particular way of doing it. There are standards for how things should go, but in terms of what notes people sing, and how elaborate they get, there’s an infinite amount of variation. That [...]

When you’re attending four or five sessions a day at a conference like LimmudNY, you start to compile an internal list of what makes a good teacher. Now, a good teacher at an event like Limmud is different from a good teacher in a regular classroom, or a college lecture hall. The age range in [...]

So I just went to my first session here at LimmudNY 2011. It was called Relationships and Sexuality Consumerist Culture Creating a Contemporary Sexual Ethic (I assume there are supposed to be some colons in there, but they aren’t in the program). It was a good session—an interesting discussion of the economics of relationships, hookups, [...]

“Do not say, ‘Why should I lessen my own fortune by giving my money to this poor person?’ Bear in mind, rather, that the wealth we posses is but held in trust for the purpose that we might use it to perform the will of the One who deposited it with us.” –Tur Yoreh Deah [...]

Many of us know that Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walked with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Selma Civil Rights March in 1965. But that’s just a tiny bit of the history of Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement. If you’re struggling to teach a civil rights lesson to your Hebrew or Sunday school [...]

NPR did a nice piece about the death this weekend of Debbie Friedman, a musician whose music impacted thousands and thousands of Jews around the world, and how her most famous piece, Mi Sheberach, was sung at the  healing service for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, held at Giffords’s synagogue, Congregation Chaverim in Tuscon. I’ve heard a [...]

If you’re thinking that’s pretty obvious, good for you. If you’re thinking, “Hey, why the heck not?” you’re a lot like a corrupt rabbi in Elad who apparently worked with an Arab gang. The gang jacked the Torahs from synagogues around Israel, and the rabbi bought them, sometimes for “just dozens of shekels for each [...]

Way back in 2007 I wrote a blog post about the weird Chinese trend of loving all things Jewish. Kind of the reverse of Jewish girls getting yin-yang tattoos is Chinese people buying books called The Eight Most Valuable Business Secrets of the Jewish. I ended that blog post with the following sentence: Am I [...]