Imagine this: American Christian denominations are battling tooth and nail over defining who is a Christian, including whether conversion performed by one may be recognized by the other. Imagine a country in which Southern Baptists refuse to marry Roman Catholics, and Unitarians refuse to marry Episcopalians. All because they refuse to recognize the other denominations […]
Independent Jewish Voices Webinar on Clash Between Judaism and Zionism
A few weeks ago I wrote an essay on a subject that has bothered me for years: how can I as a Jew have anything in common with other Jews who espouse radical hate and mass violence in the name of the Jewish God and Jewish people? The essay, Conflating Judaism and Zionism: Bad for […]
Israeli Who Crossed into Syria, Endured Family Sexual Abuse
A few days ago, I broke the gag order on reporting the story of Dina Cohen, the young Israeli who crossed the frontier into Syria two weeks before that. In an act of political protest, she had repeatedly tried to violate Israeli “borders” with Gaza, Jordan and Syria. Her goal was to reject the notion […]
Le Chambon: It Takes a Village…to Save Jews
Tonight, a small detour from my usual subjects. When I was a UCLA graduate student in 1978, I studied Yiddish with Prof. Janet Hadda. During that year, she asked the class if they would meet with a filmmaker who was planning a film on Yiddish in America. The director was Pierre Sauvage, a Franco-American documentary […]
