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Religion and Politics: Already Mixed
It’s Israel week on the Rabbis Without Borders blog. My colleagues Ben Greenberg and Alana Suskin discussed debates among university ...
A Values-Based Community: Open Hillel and Community Discourse
In a recent post my fellow Rabbis Without Borders colleague, Alana Suskin, argues on behalf of those advocating an “Open ...
Why Ursula LeGuin Would Support Swarthmore’s Open Hillel
For other perspectives on this debate, read Rabbi Ben Greenberg’s post here and Rabbi Tsafi Lev’s post here.In her series about ...
Faith in the Jewish Future
This week, I am in Israel.On Friday, I visited with a group of 18-year olds participating in Habonim-Dror [Jewish Youth Movement] ...
Obscene Recommendations
Some of the literary works I deal with in Unclean Lips are relatively well-known—Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1935) and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), for ...
“Funny, You Don’t Look Jewish…”
Three Jewish women walked into a nail salon….This is not a joke, just what I did with two of my ...
VIDEO: Ruth Calderon: A Familiar Voice, from Israel
Many wonderful things happened at last week’s JOFA Conference. But the highlight for me was Israeli Knesset member Ruth Calderon’s impromptu ...
Is “Schmuck” a Dirty Word?
One of the points I make in my book is that what’s dirty in Yiddish isn’t always dirty in English, and vice ...
Pursuing your dreams?
About a year ago, someone recommended a Paulo Coelho book to me—a popular one— The Alchemist . Most people I ...
The Poetry of Jewish Black Identity
I became Bar Mitzvah on April 20th, 2002, the 130th anniversary of Hitler’s birth. My dad’s side of the family ...
Shaving Heads, Sharing Hope
Along with the rest of the world, particularly, the interconnected collective family known as “the Jewish community,” our hearts broke ...
Giving is Justice in Action
A community is only as strong as the willingness of its members to help each other.