As was noted at My Obiter Dicta, Mrs. Erica Jesselson ע”ה passed away this week. Erica Jesselson and her late husband Ludwig were pillars of Jewish philanthropy for decades. I do not think that it is an exaggeration to speak of their incredible influence on American, if not world Judaism, through their support of numerous [...]
There is a new blog from Israel, South Jerusalem, which describes itself as “A Progressive, Skeptical Blog on Israel, Judaism, Culture, Politics, and Literature.” Among the interesting posts that have so far appeared, I want to specifically mention two. One is on Jacob Katz, and the other on Judaism, storytelling and history. Here is a [...]
On April 7, 1933, the German government enacted the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. One of its sections said that “Civil servants not of Aryan origin are to retire.” University professors were considered civil servants, and therefore this law also applied to them. One of those who answered the questionnaire regarding [...]
About twenty years ago, there was some controversy in Israel regarding Nechama Leibowitz teaching male students at R. Shlomo Riskin’s yeshivah. If my memory and the reports are correct, R. Shach opposed it entirely, and R. Ovadiah Yosef said that she could continue to teach, just that it would have to be from behind a [...]
By now it is almost a cliche, “You are the first Jew that I have ever seen, where are your horns?” Ancient Hebrew Poetry has the scoop on Moses and his frontal lobe issues in this post. As if horns, weren’t enough, somebody is now claiming that Moses and the Israelite met Carlos Castaneda’s Don [...]
There has been much talk during the past few years about independent minyanim (prayer groups), groups of people getting together to pray, study, etc., outside of the framework of organized synagogues and institutions. For some discussion see here, here, and here. While in the past the question was usually framed in terms of minyanim that [...]
There have been a number of interesting postings on Jewish-Gentile relations, conversion, etc. First Iyov points us to an article in which a writer describes their eventual conversion to Judaism. The article is worth the read. A few comments about the article. First, an article like this can be used as anecdotal proof by those [...]
For those who want to read more about Large-Scale Digitization Initiatives (LSDI’s), there is a recently published white paper here. The summary can be found here. The paper discusses such topics as digital storage quality, access to digital collections, the commercial aspect of many LSDI’s (see more here) and the impact of digital collections on [...]
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