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Kingdom of Priests

David Goldman recounts a classic Jewish joke and draws the right lesson for any discussion of Israel. It concerns a Jewish family that invites a poor man to Sabbath dinner. The hostess brings out a dish of smoked whitefish, and the poor man proceeds to wolf it down. Chagrined, the hostess says, “You know, whitefish…

Would that be Mary Robinson, who received a Presidential Medal of Freedom, or John Holdren, presidential science and technology advisor? On National Review’s The Corner, my friend Tevi Troy ably dissects Mary Robinson — “the Durban Queen, who was the driving force behind the infamous and anti-Semitic 2001 Durban Conference. At the Conference, which the…

Recently someone — it might have been of one of our older kids — asked me why Jews both inaugurate the Sabbath over a cup of a wine (at Kiddush) and bid it farewell similarly, over a cup of wine (Havdalah). I found an answer over Shabbat in Rav Hirsch’s commentary on the Torah, in…

Responding to my post asking if you can trust a guy who doesn’t drink, a reader objects, “Nobody ever got hurt by staying sober.” Providentially, Andrew Sullivan shows this is not exactly true. The quality of Stephen King’s novels, and therefore his readers’ enjoyment of them, was hurt by his achieving sobriety. So yes, as…

Popular atheist blogger PZ Myers is all excited about a book by Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Turns out the paperback is doing incredibly well, No. 5 on Amazon, perhaps due to a sensational Bill Maher interview that PZ also links to. Sharlet is full of shocking revelations…

Strange how the mind works, isn’t it? For some reason this morning I got up and was thinking about William Hall, a teacher I had in my sophomore year of high school who passed away tragically and quite young when I was in college. This was at Miraleste High School in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. When I think…

The Hebrew Bible includes both praise for and warnings about alcohol. Even a Nazirite has to bring a sacrifice at the end of his vow period (which includes a prohibition against wine) to atone for having given up a legitimate worldly pleasure. In Jewish observance, you really can’t be fully part of the program if you abstain.…

When I got home last night ready to start the 25-hour fast of Tisha b’Av (no food, water, or bathing from sunset till dark the next day), mourning the destruction of the two Jerusalem Temples and much else that’s tragic in Jewish history, the temperature was 105 degrees. Amazing! In Seattle, where thanks to the…

It’s hard for a religious believer not to appreciate, at least in part, the spirit in which Robert Wright presents his new book The Evolution of God. On one hand, he regards the history of religion as the history of an illusion. On the other hand, he argues that the evolution of that illusion represents…

Jeffrey Goldberg thinks there is such a crisis and conducts a very interesting interview with Erica Brown on the theme. You knew people would begin asking such questions, and answering them in the affirmative, when the Syrian Orthodox Jewish community centered in Deal, New Jersey, suffered its very public humiliation last week.  My own answer…
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