Jewish Holidays and Culture

For this we left Egypt?

April 19, 2024

A review of and highlights from the parody Haggadah, For This We Left Egypt? by humorists Dave Barry, Alan Zweibel and Adam Mansbach.

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Foreskin’s lament: Should Jewish males be circumcised?

October 6, 2023

I’m circumcised. So are all the men in my family. We’re Jews. That’s what we do. But have we made a terrible mistake?

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A Yom Kippur confession for a corrupt government

September 24, 2023

2023 has been a year where atonement seems as unachievable as it is necessary. For Yom Kippur, here are our sins – and an alternative.

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Was Maimonides high or just perplexed?

July 16, 2023

Was Moses Ben Maimon, the famous Middle Eastern doctor/rabbi known as the Rambam (RMBM), high when he wrote The Guide to the Perplexed? Judging by how he interpreted some of the most provocative stories in the Torah, that would certainly seem a possibility. How else to explain the RMBM’s branding of Abraham’s binding of Isaac as, essentially, […]

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What does freedom mean to you?

April 14, 2023

The protests that have roiled Israel for months have been all about “dem-o-cra-tia.” Isn’t that another way of saying “freedom?”

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The woke antisemitism of “You People”

February 12, 2023

The new Netflix film “You People” plays like a primer on how to be a self-hating Jew in America today.

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Will technology make Jewish Law irrelevant?

January 29, 2023

Will technology make halacha irrelevant? That was the question Prof. Moshe Koppel posed during a recent lecture.

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Modern-day Maccabees: Will Netanyahu’s gov’t cause an Israeli civil war?

December 28, 2022

Hanukah is a warning for anyone looking at Israel today – a dark story of intra-Jewish fighting over the religious nature of this nascent nation

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Reclaiming Zionism

November 5, 2022

After a 2022 letter at CUNY declared Israel to be a committing “ethnic cleansing,” I worried about what my son will experience in New York.

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Can the Talmud save us from structural stupidity?

July 3, 2022

American social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University Jonathan Haidt published an alarming article in the Atlantic magazine earlier this year that has since gone viral.  In the piece, Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, he asked provocatively: Is social media compatible with democracy? His somber conclusion: […]

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