by TheBarkin [➚] · Saturday, December 15th, 2007
This week, the lay leadership (and most of the professional leadership) of the Union for Reform Judaism converged on San Diego, CA for the 69th (heh heh) Biennial. Basically, this is the big conference where Reform leaders educate themselves and each other, meet to talk about pressing issues, conduct the business of the Reform movement, and launch new products and initiatives.
Some Biennial news bites:
• Delegates (or, rather, anyone who managed to be at this morning’s Shabbat services) got to take home their own copy of the new siddur, Mishkan T’filah, which is now — after quite a few delays — officially out and available for temples or individuals to purchase. Fully discussing the new siddur would take a separate post, but I think it’s fair to say that most people here are pretty excited about it.
• Michael J. Fox received the Eisendrath Bearer of Light award for his activist work. People seemed to be inspired by his speech. I rode in an elevator with him when he was leaving his hotel to go to the award reception thing. He is, indeed, short.
• URJ Press and the Women of Reform Judaism (the movement’s sisterhood wing) released a new women’s Torah commentary. It is a hefty book and is the product of some serious scholarship. I don’t know who’s going to use it (and for what), but the buzz is that it’s a good thing.
Of course, one of the big highlights was the traditional Shabbat morning sermon from Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the URJ. In these sermons, Yoffie basically picks some big issues that the Union should be focusing on, and then unveils initiatives and programs that the Union is embarking on in order to address them. You can read the whole sermon (which took him an hour to deliver) here, but here are the big points, with some commentary:
More »
by TheBarkin [➚] · Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
The LA Times‘ Joel Stein says that Jews are ready to engage in the War on Christmas. “War is a zero-sum game,” he writes, “so when Christmas is winning, Hanukkah is losing.”
You have deployed your most annoying Gentiles against us: John Gibson and Bill O’Reilly. So forget Al Franken. Once we find the alley that Pauly Shore is sleeping in, he’ll be singing the dreidel song outside your house. We’ll force storeowners to greet you with a “Happy Hanukkah” — and not the secular version but the one with the “Ch” in front and all the accompanying spittle. We’re also going to shoot you. Us Jews hear war, we take it seriously.
I realize these are difficult times. I understand the desire to declare “our” unified Christianity in public places, to fence out the Mexicans, to fight against the luxury of Muslim free speech, to pass English-only legislation. But a great nation, as our Constitution figured out, fights its populist instincts. And uses Latin to confuse its citizens.
More.
by TheBarkin [➚] · Wednesday, September 20th, 2006
Alan Dershowitz has a new book out. It’s called Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways.
Louise Christian (whose bio cites that fact that she’s sued the IDF) doesn’t like Dershowitz very much, and she uses her review of his book to say so… over and over. She says he’s a shoddy lawyer, and is “horrified” by the fact that he’d even entertain the validity of pre-emptive force. It seems that the Guardian was just looking for someone to slam Dershowitz.
Today on Slate.com, Dershowitz clarifies his point of view, slams the Guardian reviewer for apparently not reading the book, and points out that the publication’s anti-Israel stance is what’s really behind the negative review of his work. He writes:
Liberalism and Zionism are not considered mutually exclusive in America. In fact, they are complementary. The prevailing view at the Guardian is to the contrary.
Amen, right?
Read more.
by TheBarkin [➚] · Monday, August 28th, 2006
Today on Slate.com, Samantha M. Shapiro analyzes Ismar’s throwdown. Sure… it happened a few months ago, but the issue’s still ripe, I guess:
Earlier in this century, the common wisdom was that Orthodox Judaism would die out in America, outmoded and irrelevant. Instead, it’s the American Jewish center that’s eroding. Conservative Judaism, once the most popular Jewish denomination in the United States, has recently taken second place to the more clearheaded Reform movement. About 33 percent of American Jews affiliate with Conservative Judaism, down from 38 percent 10 years ago. And interestingly, as the Reform movement swells, to a lesser degree, so do the numbers of Orthodox. And as sociologist Samuel Heilman shows in his recent book, Sliding to the Right, the form of Orthodoxy that’s on the rise is the more extremist and isolationist sort—the congregations and movements that are deliberately at odds with American norms.
Read more.
by TheBarkin [➚] · Saturday, August 26th, 2006
The NY Times has an article on the Mets’ newly acquired Jewish right-fielder Shawn Green. The story quotes lots of Jewish baseball experts and a kid with Jewish hair.
I gotta tell you… I’m a freakin’ huge baseball fan. And I’m a professional Jew. And I couldn’t care less what religion Green is. I didn’t even care when he was on the Dodgers (who lost tonite in extra innings… F%$*!).
Why are people obsessed with Jewish baseball players?
(In an unrelated note… at a party last night someone says to me, “You contribute to Jewschool, right? That is so cool.” Heh.)
by TheBarkin [➚] · Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
The Chronicle reports that some Hillel leaders aren’t so interested in bitching about anti-Semitism:
“The troubling question for me,” said Chaim Seidler-Feller, executive director of the Hillel chapter at the University of California at Los Angeles, is, “‘Why can’t we hear the good news? Why are many Jews hysterical?’ We seem to be junkies for anti-Semitism.”
“Our Jewish knowledge is quite meager,” he continued. “Our positive experiences are so rare that we rely on anti-Semitism to sustain our Jewishness.”
He acknowledged that anti-Semitism does exist on campuses but reminded the 40 or so people who attended this session in a hotel conference room here that campuses are experiencing a “golden age” of Jewishness, with a significant number of Hillel chapters, university presidents and professors who are not only Jewish but identify themselves as such, and a plethora of Jewish periodicals and books published by university presses. Jewish intellectual activity, he said, is “celebrated and embraced.”
More.
by TheBarkin [➚] · Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
A few months ago, Rabbi Jack Riemer decided that Islamo-Fascists are an incarnation of Amalek.
Last week, Rabbi Marc Gellman made a similar declaration in his Newsweek column. It turns out, according to Gellman, that Amalek utilized the same tactics as Hezbollah:
What made Amalek so dastardly was that unlike any other enemy who attacked the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt from the front, Amalek attacked the rear. This meant that his soldiers could kill women and children, the elderly and the infirm and in so doing avoid engagement with the soldiers at the front. In this way he could produce maximum carnage and maximum terror.
Of course Deut. 25:17-19 instructs us to remember Amalek for a good reason. Sayeth Gellman:
I believe this is because the planned and plotted slaughter of innocents even during wartime cannot be condoned and must be remembered as a bright moral line which can never be crossed.
Sorry. I have a bullshit meter that buzzes whenever someone uses the Torah to score political points. But maybe that’s just me. Perhaps the Amalek label is appropriate here.
[Don't worry. Newsweek's erudite readers bash Gellman plenty in this week's Letters to the Editor.]
by TheBarkin [➚] · Tuesday, June 13th, 2006
Thirty-four years after becoming the first woman ordained as a rabbi in the U.S., Rabbi Sally Priesand is retiring (NYT link, can also be found here).
Though she wasn’t trying to make a political statement, Priesand started quite a trend:
Just 34 years later, 829 women have become rabbis among the three denominations – Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative – that accept women into the rabbinate. Across all three movements, women are being ordained in record numbers, a trend that is likely to further revolutionize the pulpit.
[Of course, it bears mentioning that Priesand is always called "the first woman ordained as a rabbi in the U.S.," since Paula Ackerman (1893-1989) was the first woman un-ordained rabbi in the United States, and Regina Jonas (1902-1944) of Berlin, Germany received semichah and was ordained as a rabbi in 1935.]
by TheBarkin [➚] · Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
My nomination for Strangest Jewish Book of the Year Award: What’s Up With the Hard Core Jewish People? by Margery Isis Schwartz. The author calls it, “An irreverent yet informative approach to Judaism and religious devotion from a Reform Jewish mother’s perspective.”
According to the Press Release,
“Four years ago, our youngest son took the plunge and became an Observant Jew. What a ride it has been for all of us. Whenever I relate stories regarding incidents in our household that take place with our newly observant son or tidbits of Jewish knowledge I have acquired since Carter went Hard Core, regardless of age, gender, religion, or level of religious observance, people are always fascinated. The topic has great crossover appeal. It seems like everyone knows someone who has become more intensely religious in life — whether it be Judaism or Christianity. ”
This is the first book about Observant Jews that is written from the perspective of a non-Observant person. The target audience is Jews and non-Jews who want an entertaining and easy way to learn more about Judaism. People interested in stories about how families cope with such a dramatic lifestyle change are another target segment.
As a Reform Jew myself, the book (which I admit I haven’t read) bothers me because it seems to represent denominationalism at its worst. It’s about seeing people as “other.”
And the title just makes her sound ignorant.
by TheBarkin [➚] · Thursday, April 20th, 2006
From today’s Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, check out “The Second American Jewish Revolution” by Steven Windmueller:
The past 20 years have been marked by the single largest growth of new Jewish organizations — well, at least since 1880, when the first defining period of American Judaism began.
You can rightly call it a major American Jewish revolution that is now under way.
Though lots of people have predicted this second “Great Awakening,” Windmueller, director of the School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles (say that three times fast), is proving that it’s already underway.
by TheBarkin [➚] · Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
Liberal Judaism may have been born in Germany, but until recently, Reform/Progressive synagogues were denied membership in the Central Council for Jews in Germany, the body that oversees the distribution of federal funding and membership funds to congregations across the country.
Earlier this year, the Council — which previously included only Orthodox organizations — accepted more than 10 liberal congregations into the fold. The World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) had threatened to sue.
Now, there’s this: Representatives from WUPJ met recently with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
From JTA:
“It was an opportunity for us to engage in some discussion with her as to how the Jewish population stands today, both religiously and civically,†said Rabbi Uri Regev, president of the World Union.
In 1933, Reform Judaism made up more than half of German Jewry. Looks like things may be looking up again.
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