I know, the term very Jewish is an oxymoron. Something either is or is not Jewish, and we all know the definitions, right? Not so fast. To be sure, many communities look to a fixed understanding of Jewishness, even if their understandings of that fixed definition differ. But given that many people ascribe Jewishness to…

HaRav Yehuda Amital, who was buried Friday, is mourned by thousands. Some mourn the loss of their teacher, some of one of Israel’s great public intellectuals. Some mourn the loss of the founder of Israel’s religious peace movement, Meimad, while others will miss the founder of Yeshivat Har Etzion. And of course there are those…

In an intriguing New York Times op-ed published in honor the 4th of July, author Sue Fishkoff makes a number of claims about Kashrut and why Americans, Jewish and otherwise, observe it. Like so many observers of American Jewish life however, I suspect her analysis reveals more about the author than it does about either…

The things we do for God, or imagine that we do for God, or do for an imagined God – it doesn’t matter which, since it’s largely the same thing, range from the very best things in the world to the very worst. In study after study for example, we learn that people of faith…

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