In Barbra Streisand’s musical Yentl, Nehemiah Persoff, a World War II veteran originally from Jerusalem, plays Rebbe Mendel. Mendel secretly gives Talmud lessons to Yentl (Streisand), a young girl living in a late 19th century Polish shtetl at a time when women are barred from religious study. Yentl ultimately disguises herself as her late brother in order to enter a religious school, where drama ensues.
When it comes to marriage & divorce, Israel is a theocracy under the control of its Orthodox Rabbinate. What can be done?
We ask our rabbis, “Should Jews be for or against the right to bear arms?”
In 1997, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But today the federal law is seeing an unlikely reincarnation. Moment asks six preeminent scholars: Can we find common ground between gay rights and religious freedom?
INDEPENDENT: Addiction is highlighted in the Torah’s account of the Revelation at Mount Sinai, where the One Who Spoke and the World Came into Being instructed us not to get so caught up in our subjective assumptions about God that we would carve out and worship an image reflecting those assumptions.
Moment asks a wide range of scholars, activists and religious leaders to suggest if and how religious pluralism and the chief rabbinate can coexist
Who was Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine? Many have tried to understand this complex, charismatic scholar whose embrace of modernism existed side-by-side with strict traditionalism. How to explain his contradictory mixture of tolerance and orthodoxy, nationalism and universalism, mysticism and activism? Kook was a poet, religious jurist, philosopher and communal leader. Was he a Zionist?
By Naomi Ragen // Several high-profile Israeli rabbis have come under fire for less-than-holy schemes.
Are there times when a rabbi must express his or her political opinion from the pulpit, even if it is likely to spark controversy?
