Religious Life
Mimouna!Friday, May 13, 2011 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
What did two million Israelis do when Passover ended this year? As in previous years, they celebrated Mimouna, a Moroccan Jewish holiday that is popularly observed by picnicking, barbecueing, and consuming moufletas (sweet North African pancakes). And what is Mimouna all about? No one really knows.
Beyond “Religious” and “Secular”Wednesday, May 11, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
What should be the place of the Jewish religion in a Jewish state? There are many putative answers to this question, and the answers have changed over time. When Zionism was still an aspiration, a great blank yet to be filled in, the terms of debate were set by a self-confidently secular dispensation preoccupied with state- and institution-building. In the first few decades of statehood, religion, though state-established, was clearly subservient.
Passover & the Repudiation of IdolatryFriday, April 15, 2011 by Moshe Sokolow | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Asking questions is a trademark of the Passover seder. Prior to it, we can ask another question—this one having to do with a passage in the Haggadah about the second of the four sons.
Freedom TalesWednesday, April 13, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
An enslaved people, brutalized, voiceless except for groans and cries, comes into possession of a voice of their own: no wonder the tale itself sometimes seems to embody the whole meaning of the Exodus.
Telling Jewish TimeMonday, April 11, 2011 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The most acclaimed Jewish Bible commentary opens with a question. Why, asks Rashi (1040–1105), does the Torah begin with the account of creation, when it should properly have begun with God's revelation of His very first law to Moses on the eve of the Exodus from Egypt: "This month shall be for you the first of months"?
Clash of CivilizationsFriday, April 8, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The death toll in Afghanistan has passed the two-dozen mark in the riots "inspired" by Pastor Terry Jones's burning of a Quran in Florida. The grisly political theater has served its purpose.
Gandhi and the JewsTuesday, April 5, 2011 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) has set off stormy protests in India for implying that the country's founding father was bisexual. That's only the beginning of it.
“The Sickening Question”: God, Cancer, and UsMonday, April 4, 2011 by Eve Levavi Feinstein | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Many scholars of the Bible and ancient Judaism prefer to focus exclusively on ancient texts and the world that produced them, refraining from engaging with the implications of their work for contemporary religious life. James L. Kugel has never been one of those scholars.
Sifting the Cairo GenizahFriday, April 1, 2011 by Lawrence Grossman | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Everyone knows about the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered over 60 years ago, and about the new light they shed on the sectarian Judaism of late antiquity, the beginnings of rabbinic Judaism, and possibly the prehistory of Christianity. Fifty years before that, the Cairo Genizah similarly revolutionized the picture of the Jewish Middle Ages.
Three BlessingsWednesday, March 23, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The Jewish prayer book (siddur) is thick with texts: blessings, thanksgivings, and petitions, instructions, theological claims, and historical memories. Some traditional texts bear especially outsized burdens. In this respect, few can rival three lines that begin "Blessed are you O God, King of the Universe, Who has not made me . . . " and conclude, respectively, "a goy [Gentile]," "a slave," and "a woman."
Editors' Picks
Changes Fred MacDowell, On the Main Line. On Orthodox liturgical reform during the 19th century, and the case of one British synagogue.
Shrine Online Sohrab Ahmari, Tablet. Unable to restore a shrine with a prominent Star of David in Iran, a U.S. organization and an Iranian-American architect are reviving the site in cyberspace.
Is the Kotel Plaza a Synagogue? David Golinkin, G’vanim. How should the State of Israel respond to the increasing religious policing around the Western Wall that is slowly but surely turning the area into a Haredi synagogue? (PDF)
Shnorrers Simon Yisrael Feuerman, Tablet. One dollar buys you a torrent of blessings from the elderly Russians who sit in the synagogue literally with their hands out: A gut yahr, na zdrovie, they say. Spraznikom. And those are just the regulars.
Incitement and Enlightenment Yitzhak Laor, Haaretz. Even the fact that ultra-Orthodox women work in professions while the men are increasingly cooking and taking care of the children isn't enough. The Left demands a single set of standards for everyone: its own.
Extremism, Ideology, Reform Yair Ettinger, Haaretz. We hear a lot about the ultra-Orthodox community's fractious encounters with outsiders. But is this growing extremism a reaction to dramatic changes within ultra-Orthodoxy itself?
A Grief Observed Eitan Fishbane, Atlantic. "Three and a half months it took me, but today when I woke I knew all of a sudden; all at once I was filled with the desire, with the need, to visit your grave": a young widower's kaddish.
Bullies, Sluts, Bulimics . . . and Supreme Court Justices Shira Kohn, Lilith. Given the numbers of women involved over the decades, historians won't be able to ignore the Jewish sorority experience for much longer. (PDF)
Communal Table Stanley Ginsberg, Forward. What exactly are "Jewish baked goods"? The ones that come first to mind—bagels, rugelach, challah—can all be traced back to the Gentile European societies in which the Jews found themselves living at various times.
Radical Orthodoxy Daniel Boyarin, Book of Doctrines and Opinions. The Talmud scholar imagines a religious practice, "free of the ethnocentrism and even racism that characterizes so much of contemporary orthodox language . . . that would authentically enable my own radical political commitments." (Interview with Alan Brill)