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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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,…