There is an interview (Hebrew) on the website Kipa with MK Ruth Calderon. Here is one snippet. …Talmud is a project unlike any other. It is a sort of frozen product that you reheat anew. It is the frozen food of intellectuals, of people who love wisdom more than the bottom line. Talmud is not [...]
While many rabbis are arguing over who will be the next Chief Rabbis of Israel, the Rabbinic Cabinet of Memizrach Shemesh is raising a voice against the proposed Israeli budget. Below is a translation of the first paragraph: We, the below signed, are rabbis in Israel who come into daily contact with Am Yisrael. We [...]
Hadassa Margolese, whose daughter was profiled in the now famous Israel Channel Two news segment on attacks against schools girls in Beit Shemesh, has chosen her next battle, the mikveh. In a recently published article (Hebrew) in Maariv titled “The Mikveh Lady as Babysitter: Trauma at the Mikveh.” She writes about the sometimes degrading treatment [...]
The following are numbers from a recently released poll from the Israel Democracy Institute. (HT Tomer Persico on FB) The results can be found here in English (HT Benjamin of Tudela), and in Hebrew here. They are from a poll conducted in April, before the most recent prayer service by Women of the Wall at the [...]
Now that the Jerusalem City Council has decided to name a street (it will be on Givat Ram) after Yeshayahu Leibowitz, I recommend watching these documentaries about him to see what he had to say. The first documentary consists of two videos and has English subtitles. The third video is another fascinating documentary that is [...]
A Jerusalem cafe owner’s indictment of OU mehadrin kashrut supervision. (Hebrew)
In Moment Guy Ben-Porat writes about his new book, Between State and Synagogue: The Secularization of Contemporary Israel. Ben-Porat discusses secularization in Israel not as reflective of less religion, but of the weakening of religious authority. The expansion of commerce on the Sabbath, a thriving non-kosher culinary culture, marriages performed outside the Orthodox rabbinate, civil [...]
Below is a video of MK Ruth Calderon’s recent talk at JTS. (HT to Yossi Hoffman on Twitter)
The ultra-Orthodox newspaper Ba-Kehillah (In the Community) has a policy of not including pictures of women, but this one shows how sick and disturbing this policy is. (HT) The picture is from this (Hebrew) Ynet article.
Regev Ben-David has a very good post on the Tikvah Fund web site about pluralistic Judaism in Israel. (HT to Yair Rosenberg on Twitter) One of the most important things for American Jews to take away from this post is that Israeli Judaism is not and will not be the same as American Judaism.
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