For Jewish progressives who remember the dark days of George W. Bush and Republican control of both houses of Congress, evangelicals are the election cycle boogeyman. We’ve already seen a growing stream of books and articles about evangelical conspiracies supposedly aimed at using Republican presidential candidates, such as Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann, to turn the United States into a “Christian nation.” These include Michelle Goldberg’s Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and Rabbi James Rudin’s The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us. In a series for public radio, Rachel Tabachnick reported on the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which aims to wage “spiritual warfare,” leveraging stealth political influence to take dominion over government, business and culture and hasten the second coming of Jesus.

Arcane, sensational theological doctrines like this are catnip to conspiracy theorists and their media enablers. Yet many of those most fearful of evangelicals know the least about them. Back in September, The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart implicitly acknowledged that ignorance when he surveyed a clip of spectators at a Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. With his customary acuity, Stewart deconstructed the upscale audience in dresses, jackets and ties: “Look at this crowd. They’re not yahoos. This is not your torch and pitchfork angry villagers. These are people with firm opinions on which is the best brand of rider mower.” Kidding or not, Stewart at least recognized the evangelical Christians of the GOP base for what they are: moderate, middle-class Sun Belt suburbanites.

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Dozens of rabbis from across Europe have gathered in Warsaw for the largest meeting of Jewish religious leaders in Poland since the community was virtually wiped out during World War II.

This year’s Conference of European Rabbis will focus on a range of issues affecting European and global Jewry, including attempts in Europe to ban the Jewish method of religious slaughter of animals.

But, the rabbis will also discuss the problem of validating the Jewish identity of people who have not practiced Judaism in two or three generations. This has become an issue in countries like Poland, where many people with Jewish ancestry were so traumatized by the Holocaust and postwar anti-Semitism that they lived secular or Christian lives for decades and are only now again embracing a Jewish life.

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The bell rings, and 19 middle school girls shuffle into Room 405 at the Solomon Schechter School of Westchester, slinging backpacks over chairs and sliding behind desks.

After quickly taking attendance, the teacher gets down to business.

“What’s the first step in a manicure?” she asks. Hands fly up; answers are blurted out.

It’s the Midrash Manicures club at Schechter, a Jewish day school here, where the weekly club offerings include math club, glee club, sports writing club and this one, in which Rabbi Yael Buechler teaches girls in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades how to do their nails with designs inspired by the weekly Torah portion.

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As Jews around the world gather to celebrate Simchat Torah next week””the raucous holiday marking the completion of the annual cycle of public Torah readings””I am reminded of one of the more curious practices among Soviet Jews in the final decades of the Communist regime.

Living under duress, these Jews gathered illegally in homes or even in the streets to celebrate a holiday for an object that most had never seen, let alone read from. Such celebrations persisted despite systematic anti-Jewish persecution by the Soviets, including university quotas, discouragement from certain jobs, and an all-out effort to eradicate Jewish culture and religion.

And yet 20 years after the Soviet Union’s fall, this act of defiance has taken on an entirely different character….

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An Anglican priest here says he’s working with the U.S. Embassy to persuade the handful of Jews who still live in Baghdad to leave because their names have appeared in cables published last month by WikiLeaks.

The Rev. Canon Andrew White said he first approached members of the Jewish community about what he felt was the danger they faced after a news story was published last month that made reference to the cables.

“The U.S. Embassy is desperately trying to get them out,” White said. So far, however, only one, a regular confidante of the U.S. Embassy, according to the cables, had expressed interest in emigrating to the United States.

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Throughout the nation’s history, American soldiers have fought for God and country. During the Civil War, the bonds of country were blurred, but faith in God remained strong on both sides, blue and gray….

…[Yesterday], the S.C. Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum debuts a new exhibit ”” “Through Fiery Trials: Religion in the Civil War” ”” taking a look at that faith. It is the second in a series of special exhibits commemorating the war’s 150th anniversary.

While the stars of the exhibit are Bibles belonging to Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, on loan from Virginia museums, one of the most moving items is local: The bullet-pierced Bible of Sgt. Walter Henry Counts of Lexington.

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Jews, Muslims and their allies cheered Sunday (Oct. 2) as California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill prohibiting all local bans on circumcision, making it illegal for local authorities to restrict the medical or religious practice.

Anti-circumcision activists had gathered enough signatures to place the issue on the ballot in San Francisco. Voters would have been asked to decide if infant circumcision should be banned as an unnecessary genital mutilation, a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.

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… in recent years, the break-fast party has become part of the Jewish social calendar. From Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, many are attending large, crowded break-fasts, where the spirit of the High Holy Days can get lost in the mixing, and where the day’s solemnity quickly abates, smothered by large quantities of cream cheese and hummus.

Vanessa Ochs, who teaches religion at the University of Virginia, says the new, bigger break-fast raises theological questions. Even before the day of repentance is over, many people are forced to think about the meal they will be serving.

“In the last 25 years, the break-fast has, in some friendship groups, become such a moment for gratitude and coming together that people will stay home from services to cook and prepare,” Dr. Ochs said. “That isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing, but from a non-halakhic” ”” extra-legal ”” “perspective, if this meal marks who is in your friendship circle, and who is going to be there for you, then this is a holy communal feast.”

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For an atheist, Maxim Schrogin talks about God a lot.

Over lunch at a Jewish deli, he ponders the impulse to believe ”” does it come from within or without? Why does God permit suffering? Finally, he pulls out a flowchart he made showing degrees of belief, which ranges from unquestioning faith to absolute atheism. He stabs the paper with his pen.

“This is where I fall,” he said. “Zero.”

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‘I love beginnings,’ Elie Wiesel told a panel of eight students on stage and about 700 in the audience during a Sunday appearance at the College of Charleston’s Sottile Theatre.

That’s because he thought Auschwitz signified the end of history, he said. And because much of human endeavor tends to end badly, with injustice, terror and death. Though the meaning of life can be elusive, it is the obligation of human beings to act in ways that make a better world.

‘When one person suffers, you have to do something,’ he said later, at an evening lecture that filled the Sottile for a second time. ‘The opposite of hate is not love, but indifference. Indifference is the opposite of everything that’s created, everything that’s noble in human experience. The opposite of indifference is commitment, education.’

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The conference ”” held at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, a town in the Atlas Mountains about two hours south of Rabat ”” brought together Holocaust scholars and survivors, leaders of Morocco’s Jewish community and American Jewish and Moroccan Muslim students. Its twin mandates were to teach about the extermination of European Jewry and to pay homage to the courage of Morocco’s wartime king, Mohammed V, in resisting the orders of the Vichy French occupation government to round up and turn over Jews for internment and probable death.

Uncommonly among Arab and Muslim nations, Morocco has accepted the reality of the Holocaust, rather than either dismissing it outright or portraying it as a European crime for which those countries paid the price in the form of Israel’s creation. Partly, no doubt, because of Mohammed V’s stand against the Vichy regime, the current king, Mohammed VI, called in a 2009 proclamation for “an exhaustive and faithful reading of the history of this period” as part of “the duty of remembrance dictated by the Shoah.”

Still, the recent conference would never have occurred without Mr. Boudra. Now 24 and majoring in political science, Mr. Boudra grew up after much of Morocco’s Jewish population had moved to France or Israel. But he heard from his grandmother about her childhood in the Jewish quarter of Casablanca, and a grandfather still had Jewish neighbors in his apartment house.

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The Jewish High Holidays are upon us, so naturally it’s time for the White House to feed political talking points to rabbis.

As has become its annual practice, the Obama administration on Thursday convened a conference call with several hundred rabbis and Jewish leaders. According to a participant on the call, President Obama promoted his jobs bill””noting that those who have been more blessed should pay their fair share””and briefed the rabbis on U.S. efforts to counter the push for a declaration of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.

I was on another such call recently, the purpose of which””according to the Jewish rabbinical group that invited me””was to help listeners “understand the current state of the economy; learn about the impact of the proposed budget cuts on the poor and disenfranchised; consider the consequences of the increasing gap between the rich and poor in America; and, glean homiletic and textual background to help prepare their High Holiday sermons on this timely topic.”

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“We evangelicals cringe like everyone else at the prominence given to marginal groups labeled with our name,” says the Rev. Joel Hunter, an influential megachurch pastor in Orlando and an ideological centrist. “We know their numbers are small and their influence is grossly exaggerated, but we are not surprised that the majority of common-sense believers are not given equal attention in a society fascinated by extremes.”

Most evangelicals accept some form of evolution and do not subscribe to arcane doctrines, such as “Christian Reconstructionism” and “Dominionism,” that Christians need to rule the world in order to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus. And, contrary to recent writing by some progressive Jews, most evangelicals are comfortable with the notion of theological tolerance and religious pluralism. “The media have been too eager to feature a simpleton image of evangelicals,” says Hunter. “Our part of the faith community is, on the whole, intelligent, accepting of diversity, and wanting the best practical solutions for the common good….”

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In short, things are not looking good for Americans like myself who see religious liberty as one of the great achievements of the American experiment. Today, not only Muslims but also Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhists and humanists are on the outside of American public culture looking in. But as Jesus once said, “Take heart.”

The United States has survived a series of culture wars in which Catholics, Mormons and members of other religious minorities were anathematized as un-American. In each case, Americans as a group have eventually decided to live not by fear but by first principles, not least the constitutional protection of liberty afforded in the First Amendment to Americans of all creeds.

Sept. 11, 2001, was, of course, a national trauma. Americans responded to that trauma, however, with a show of unity that crossed lines of race, region and religion. Such unity is easier to find in wartime, of course, or when one of our cities is strewn by hate with cremated remains. But it is always there in our cultural DNA ”” in Jefferson’s insistence in his first inaugural address that “we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” and in the words of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural: “We are not enemies, but friends.”

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Jews and Muslims worshiping on Friday also addressed the national tragedy.

Temple Emanu-el Rabbi Jonathan Miller’s sermon was written to connect the 9/11 anniversary to Jewish traditions of mourning and to tell the Birmingham, Ala., congregation why acts of evil might be forgiven but never forgotten (www.ourtemple.org).

“If we want to destroy the evil, we have to live into our better selves and make sure these terrorists, like the terrorists before them, have no place in the things that are holy to us,” Miller said.

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[Alasdair MacIntyre’s]…minatory warning was: “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.” That was a scary thing to hear from one of the world’s great philosophers. I soon began to hear it from other leading intellectuals also, such as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Robert Bellah. That is what I heard in the echoes of 9/11: that all great civilisations eventually decline, and when they begin to do so they are vulnerable. That is what Osama bin Laden believed about the West and so did some of the West’s own greatest minds.

If so, then 9/11 belongs to a wider series of phenomena affecting the West: the disintegration of the family, the demise of authority, the build-up of personal debt, the collapse of financial institutions, the downgrading of the American economy, the continuing failure of some European economies, the loss of a sense of honour, loyalty and integrity that has brought once esteemed groups into disrepute, the waning throughout the West of a sense of national identity; even last month’s riots.

These are all signs of the arteriosclerosis of a culture, a civilisation grown old. Whenever Me takes precedence over We, and pleasure today over viability tomorrow, a society is in trouble. If so, then the enemy is not radical Islam, it is us and our by now unsustainable self-indulgence.

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In Syracuse, as in countless other communities, 9/11 set off a phenomenon that may seem counterintuitive in an era of increasingly vocal Islamophobia. A terrorist attack that provoked widespread distrust and hostility toward Muslims also brought Muslims in from the margins of American religious life ”” into living rooms, churches, synagogues and offices where they had never set foot before.

American Christians and Jews reached out to better understand Islam and ”” they will admit ”” to find out firsthand whether the Muslims in their midst were friends or foes. Muslims also reached out, newly conscious of their insularity, aware of the suspicions of their neighbors, determined that the ambassadors of Islam should not be the terrorists.

“Before 9/11 we were somewhat timid,” said Saad Sahraoui, president of the Islamic Society of Central New York, the largest mosque in Syracuse, when the attacks occurred in 2001. “We just kept to ourselves, just concerned with our families and our children….

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The Rev. Peter D’Angio, rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, said the Episcopal church ruled in 2009 to allow same-sex blessing ceremonies on a national level.

In states that legally recognize gay marriages, episcopal churches are allowed to perform the actual marriage ceremony when the bishop in that district gives the OK, he said.

“I think religion has a part to play in same-sex blessings,” the Rev. D’Angio said. “People have the desire for a member of the clergy, whatever religion, to invoke God’s blessing on their relationship.”

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The man behind the discovery and restoration of the [Vengrov] Torah, Rabbi Menachem Youlus, was arrested Wednesday on federal fraud charges.

Youlus, 50, was released on $100,000 bail after appearing before a U.S. magistrate judge. His lawyer, Paul Rooney, denied the accusations, according to news reports.

Court documents show that Youlus, who had been affiliated with the nonprofit Save a Torah, was charged with one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud for allegedly scheming to “(obtain) money and property by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises.”

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Too much of contemporary society has been a vacation from responsibility. Children have been the victims of our self-serving beliefs that you can have partnerships without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality, and self-esteem without the responsibility of hard work and achievement.

I have seen, in our schools and youth groups, what happens to children when you challenge them to greatness by service to others. They exceed all our expectations. Children grow to fit the space we create for them. If it is big they grow tall. If it is small, they rebel.

We need a new culture of responsibility. Societies can be re-moralised. The 1820s showed us how. This week’s riots showed us why. We need to challenge young people to exercise moral leadership, and the only way of doing so is by starting with ourselves.

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Deep in America’s heartland, a Reform synagogue, a nondenominational mosque and an… [Episcopal] church are all putting down roots on a 37-acre tract of land that once belonged to a Jewish country club. A body of water called Hell Creek runs through the development, over which the faith groups plan to build “Heaven’s Bridge.”

Fantastical as it sounds, this interfaith campus is currently in the works in Omaha, Neb. Slated for completion in 2014, the Tri-Faith Initiative is an experiment in religious coexistence in a city better known as a hub of corn-fed conservatism.

“The only other place where such a thing exists is Jerusalem,” said Dr. Syed Mohiuddin, chairman of the Creighton University School of Medicine. Mohiuddin’s organization, the American Institute of Islamic Studies and Culture, is building a mosque on the campus. “Jerusalem is so important to these three faiths. We are sort of reproducing that model.”

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What’s the path to religious acceptance in America””and what can Muslims, Mormons and Buddhists learn from Jews and Catholics?

A Gallup report out last week found that, of all major religious groups in America, Muslims are the most optimistic about their future. When asked what they think their lives will be like in five years, Muslims see themselves as having a better life than do members of any other religious group. They are also most likely to say that their community is getting better as a place to live.

Why is such optimism warranted even though Muslims are also the religious group most likely to report experiencing discrimination?

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Jewish groups in America have welcomed Thursday’s decision by a California Superior Court judge to remove a proposal aimed at banning circumcision from a San Francisco city ballot scheduled for November.

In response to the initiative, a number of Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco and the Anti-Defamation League, along with several individual plaintiffs ”“ both Jewish and Muslim ”“ filed a suit in June against the city, claiming that California state law prohibited municipal governments from restricting or regulating medical procedures.

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PROFESSOR BERNARD SABELLA (Al-Quds University): The places are important, but you need to make these places to come alive, and you cannot do that without indigenous Palestinian Christians in the Holy Land.

[KIM] LAWTON: The overwhelming majority of Christians here are Arabs. They were among the hundreds of thousands displaced in 1948, when the State of Israel was established and in the wars that followed. For decades now, Palestinian Christians have continued to emigrate at disproportionately high rates, and their birth rates are much lower than those of Muslims. Roughly 150,000 Christians live in Israel proper””about two percent of the population. In the Palestinian Territories, it’s estimated that Christians make up just over one percent of the population. There are also small Christian minorities in disputed East Jerusalem. The circumstances for Christians vary in each of those places and, like most things here, a lot of it is shaped by the ongoing conflict.

SABELLA: The challenge, I think, to Palestinian Christians, in my view, and to Christian communities in Israel and the Middle East, is really to stay put.

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Amy Winehouse will have a funeral in the Jewish tradition once her body is released for burial after…[its] post mortem. If the tradition is followed strictly her grave, likely to be in North London, will not to have a tombstone until a year has passed. Her place of burial is likely to become a shrine like the graves of other pop stars such as Jim Morrison, who also died at 27 and is buried in Paris.

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, of Maidenhead synagogue, said: “As someone with Jewish parents and brought up Jewishly, Amy Winehouse never lost her sense of Jewish roots in later life. She still saw herself as part of the Jewish community, while the Jewish community always regarded her as one of its talented but wayward members.”

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ARCHBISHOP VINCENT NICHOLS, Catholic Bishops’ Conf. of England and Wales: The Holy Land and the holy sites could become something like the Coliseum, you know, the remnants of something that is of great historical interest and maybe of cultural interest, but not lived in, not living and breathing centers of life and prayer.

[KIM] LAWTON: The leaders discussed concrete ways to help the predominantly Palestinian Christian community, such as financial support, building more relationships between congregations and increasing public policy advocacy. As part of that, the group specifically called for an end to security restrictions that prevent local people of faith from visiting their holy sites. Conference organizers denied criticism from some quarters that supporting Palestinian Christians makes one “anti-Israel.”

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In a potential blow to the proposed San Francisco circumcision ban, the city’s top lawyer has concluded it is unconstitutional to ban the practice as a religious ritual, but allow it as a medical procedure.

The measure, now headed toward the Nov. 8 ballot, would ban nearly all infant circumcisions.

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The Anglican paper presented by Mrs. Clare Amos highlighted the dialectic of whether the Psalms should be considered as ‘our words to God’ or ‘God’s words to us’ and reviewed the changing place and role of Psalms in Anglican liturgy and life. In response, Chief Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen examined the place of David as temporal and spiritual leader and how this was reflected in specific Psalms.

The papers and the ensuing discussion reflected on the way in which Psalms may serve as a calibrating resource to curb human arrogance and combat despair. Furthermore, in highlighting the creative tensions between the transcendent and the immanent, the Psalms demonstrate both the constancy and intimacy of the Divine Presence.

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The international basketball federation has decided to permit an Orthodox Jewish basketball player to cover her arms during competitions in accordance with her religious beliefs.

FIBA made the decision several weeks after point guard Naama Shafir, a member of the Israeli national women’s basketball team, said she would be unable to play in the sleeveless regulation jerseys worn by all players

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