Arts and Culture

Elsewhere: a Faith story, for Grace Paley

By Dan Bellm

She woke up to a clinking sound like a stuck thought, as if there were some pestering obstacle in a story she wasn’t writing that would work itself out in her sleep if she could pay attention enough.

News and Politics

Marc Gafni Abuses Again -- and We Share Responsibility

By Dina Levada

I am raising my voice to my fellow Jews that we have been silent about this man for too long, and now our silence has led to yet more abuse. In this season of repentance, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

News and Politics

Conservative Money and Jewish Studies: Investigating the Tikvah Fund

By Zachary Braiterman

A hundred-million-dollar right-wing Jewish foundation is attempting to change the political face of Jewish studies and the Jewish press. Zachary Braiterman, Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, investigates.

Arts and Culture

Albert J. Winn's “Summer Joins the Past”

By Jeffrey Shandler

Summer camps offer brief encounters with utopia. Though usually located somewhere out in the wild, they are constructed, self contained domains, each fostering a worldview of its own. Dedicated to the collective living of an ideal existence, summer camps promote fantasy.“Summer Joins the Past,” Albert J. Winn’s series of photographs of abandoned Jewish summer camps in North America, offers a quiet yet eloquently evocative tour of these places out of time.

Arts and Culture

Salt and Pepper

By Samuel Menashe

A poem by Samuel Menashe (1925-2011)

News and Politics

Call Jewish Fundamentalism What It Is

Why, when it comes to Jewish Fundamentalists, are we afraid to use the term, and tend to think of Hasidim as cuddly-cute characters from Fiddler on the Roof or The Chosen?

Media and Tech

Getting Beyond Outreach: Web 2.0 Judaism

By Charles Lenchner

I told the Federation rep, “You’d have to transfer power and resources from a top-down agenda to a listening agenda. You’d have to grant a voice to people who aren’t major donors yet. You’d have to message differently, write differently, even think differently about what your relationship with your constituents is supposed to look like.”

They laughed a bit and said, “That’s not going to happen.”

Faith and Practice

Speaking of Goddess: Finding the Sacred Feminine in the Song of Songs

By Rabbi Julia Watts-Belser

The past forty years of Jewish feminist thought and theology have seen powerful analysis and fruitful conversations about the Divine, the feminine, and the power of the language we use to evoke and invoke the Holy in our lives. Yet to speak of Goddess in a Jewish context is still often to speak in a whisper.

Arts and Culture

Is There a Future for the New Jewish Culture?

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser

The big wave of hip, innovative Jewish media seems to have washed out.