RABBI SHIRA STUTMAN (Director of Community Engagement, Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, Washington, DC): The Shavuot holiday is actually one of the more important holidays in the Jewish tradition, and it basically has two reasons for being. The original reason comes out of the Israelite people being an agricultural people a few thousand years ago in the land that we now call Israel. The Israelites would bring the bikkurim, the first fruits, the first offerings, of their harvest up to the temple as an offering to God, as a way of saying thank you and in hopes of a good harvest.

After the temple was destroyed in about 70 CE, the rabbis needed to enlarge the understanding of Shavuot because we no longer had a temple to which people could bring their offerings. So they brought forward this understanding of Shavuot as being the anniversary of revelation: the anniversary of the moment that God gave the Torah, our Bible or a part of the Hebrew Bible, to the Israelite people on Mount Sinai, basically turning them from this rag-tag group of slaves who had just weeks ago come out of Egypt into a people complete with its own set of texts and ways of being in the world.

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Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders greeted the news of the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden with varying degrees of relief, regret and caution.

Considered the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. that killed nearly 3,000 people, bin Laden was killed by United States forces in Pakistan, U.S. President Barack Obama announced on May 1.

Some Muslim groups welcomed the news, with several stressing that bin Laden did not represent the values of Islam. “We hope his death will bring some relief to all the families of every faith and walk of life who lost loved ones on 9/11 and in every other terrorist attack orchestrated at the hands of Osama bin Laden,” the Islamic Society of North America said in a news release.

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American Jews and evangelicals need a formal mechanism to discuss their differences and similarities on support for Israel, leaders from both sides said Thursday (April 28) at the American Jewish Committee’s Global Forum 2011.

Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, spoke alongside Gary Bauer, president of American Values and a board member of Christians United for Israel, about Jewish groups’ concerns over evangelical support for Israel.

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….[Rabbi Tuvia Geffen] of the long beard and wire-rim glasses and Yiddish-inflected English, a man by all outward appearances belonging to the Old World… was the person who by geographical coincidence and unexpected perspicacity adapted Coca-Cola’s secret formula to make the iconic soft drink kosher in one version for Passover and in another for the rest of the year. To this day, his 1935 rabbinical ruling, known in Hebrew as a teshuva, remains the standard.

That ruling, in turn, did much more than solve a dietary problem. A generation after Frank’s lynching, a decade after Congress barred the Golden Door, amid the early stages of Hitler’s genocide, kosher Coke formed a powerful symbol of American Jewry’s place in the mainstream.

“Rabbi Geffen really got the importance of it,” said Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, who specializes in Jewish life in the South. “You couldn’t live in any better place than the South to get it. To not drink Coca-Cola was certainly to be considered un-American.”

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Will the Conservative Party make funds available to improve security around Jewish institutions including schools as recommended in the recent all-party report on anti-Semitism?

We’ve got to stop the rise of anti-Semitism, and I will always stand firm against anti-Semitism, in all its forms and wherever it occurs. I support the work the Community Security Trust does to provide extra vigilance for the Jewish Community. I have spoken at its dinners, supported its work and assisted with fund raising. I back faith-based organisations and what they do: they form an important part of my vision of the Big Society. But we also need to do much more in terms of freeing up the police from bureaucracy and paperwork and form-filling so that they have more time to focus on these sorts of issues. I can promise you is that with a Conservative Government we will never allow anti-Semitism to go unchecked in this country, and we will work flat out to reverse the radicalisation and root out the sources of radicalisation which have grown up over the last few years.

What is the Conservative Party’s commitment to faith schools?

I have visited Jewish Schools in London and Birmingham. I’m a big supporter of faith schools, personally as well as politically.

Personally, because my daughter, Nancy, goes to an excellent Church of England school and we’re really lucky in that. Politically, because I think that faith schools are a really important part of our education system and they often have a culture and ethos which helps to drive up standards. If anything, I would like to see faith schools grow. Through our school reform plans, there will be a real growth in new good school places, and we’re anticipating that some of these will be in faith schools.

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Tonight is Passover, American Jews’ most observed religious ritual. They’ll retell the story of freedom from slavery in Egypt during a ritual meal, the Seder, and conclude with a vision of the future: “Next year in Jerusalem.”

But with each passing year, Jewish numbers are threatened. Surveys find fewer U.S. Jews and more who are unaffiliated and uninterested in the established Jewish religious and institutional life.

Now, to meet the challenge, young and young-minded creative Jews in the arts, philanthropy, technology and more are launching or expanding innovative programs to experience their ancient faith and culture with a 21st-century twist. A sampling of innovations includes projects as “right now” as tonight’s webcam/live-chat Online Seder, rallying Jews to a virtual table.

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Of all Jewish holiday traditions, the most popular remains the Passover seder””the festive ritual meal, celebrated next week, at which family and friends gather to recount the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt and deliverance from bondage to freedom. It’s so popular, in fact, that these days more and more of those seated at seder tables are non-Jews. Not only that: An increasing number of churches now offer their own versions of the Passover seder.

The Passover seder’s embrace by Christians seems an unlikely phenomenon. The Passover haggadah””the book that guides the seder service as prescribed by Jewish tradition””is designed to fulfill the Torah’s commandment that Jews remember and retell the journey from slavery to freedom every year. The haggadah’s reminder is explicit: “If the most holy, blessed be He, had not brought forth our ancestors from Egypt, we, and our children, and children’s children, had still continued in bondage to the Pharaohs in Egypt.” Jews are taught to celebrate each Passover as if they themselves were embarking on that journey from Egypt.

What makes Christians’ embrace of Passover all the more unusual is that for centuries””even into the 20th””the holiday’s proximity to Good Friday and Easter routinely sparked violent anti-Jewish riots and pogroms, especially in Europe.

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In the large and growing Orthodox Jewish communities around New York and elsewhere, rabbinic leaders are sounding an alarm about an unexpected problem: a wave of anorexia and other eating disorders among teenage girls.

While no one knows whether such disorders are more prevalent among Orthodox Jews than in society at large, they may be more baffling to outsiders. Orthodox women are famously expected to dress modestly, yet matchmakers feel no qualms in asking about a prospective bride’s dress size ”” and her mother’s ”” and the preferred answer is 0 to 4, extra small.

Rabbis say the problem is especially hard to treat because of the shame that has long surrounded mental illness among Orthodox Jews.

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It may seem odd that Madonna, who is not Jewish, is the public face of Kabbalah. It was the Berg family that repackaged an esoteric body of Jewish thought”””the secret life of Judaism,” in Scholem’s words””into a universal self-help theosophy open to Jew and Gentile alike. In the process, the Centre stripped Kabbalah of much of its Jewishness. The website states it plainly: “Kabbalah is not a religion.” Yehuda Berg, though himself a rabbi, has said that he doesn’t consider himself Jewish, and in a cover blurb for his 2002 book, “The Power of Kabbalah,” Madonna underscores this point, writing that Kabbalah has “nothing to do with religious dogma.”

So what does the Kabbalah Centre have to do with classical Jewish mysticism? Not much, according to critics. The great Talmudic scholar Adin Steinsaltz has likened the connection to “the relationship between pornography and love.” Allan Nadler, a professor of Jewish Studies at Drew University, is even less charitable: “The Bergs hijacked an ancient, highly secretive Jewish tradition and popularized it as pseudo-mystical, New Age nonsense.”

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One of the hottest college campuses in the U.S. for Jewish students is also one of the unlikeliest: a small Lutheran school erected around a soaring stone chapel with a cross on top.

In what is being called a testament to word of mouth in the Jewish community, approximately 34 percent of Muhlenberg College’s 2,200 students are Jewish. And the biggest gains have come in the past five years or so.

Perhaps equally noteworthy is how Muhlenberg has responded, by offering a kosher menu at the student union, creating a partnership with the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and expanding its Hillel House, a social hub for Jews.

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They could be the earliest Christian writing in existence, surviving almost 2,000 years in a Jordanian cave. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born.

A group of 70 or so “books”, each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007.

A flash flood had exposed two niches inside the cave, one of them marked with a menorah or candlestick, the ancient Jewish religious symbol.

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A New York rabbi with a reputation for innovation has been tapped to lead the Union for Reform Judaism, the umbrella group for the country’s Reform synagogues, starting in 2012.

Rabbi Richard Jacobs has headed Westchester Reform Temple since 1991 and recently completed construction of the nation’s largest “green synagogue” to house its 1,200 families. The pulpit is Jacobs’ second since his ordination in 1982.

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Last June, writer and political scientist Peter Beinart launched a broadside at the American Jewish community, accusing it of forsaking its own liberal democratic values in blind support of Israel’s rightward lurch, and in the process creating a generation of young Jews who feel no attachment to the Jewish state.

“The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” published in the New York Review of Books, made a lot of waves and fueled a wider argument about when, and whether, American Jews should speak out against Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The discussion will continue 7 p.m. Thursday [in the Pittsburgh area]…His topic: “Is the love affair over? Young American Jews and Israel.”

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Television writer-producer Jill Soloway turned off her electronic devices for 24 hours last Saturday and spent the morning playing with her 2-year-old son in her yard in Silver Lake.

“It was excruciating and kind of wonderful. I struggled with a feeling of anxiety that there was something in my inbox I needed to tend to,” she said. “Then came a moment when it felt like a holiday. Holiday means holy day. What a huge gift.”

Soloway, executive producer of the Showtime series “United States of Tara,” and a self-described smartphone junkie, was taking part in the “National Day of Unplugging,” organized by Reboot, a group of urban media professionals who try to reconnect with Jewish tradition in a way that is meaningful to their hectic lives.

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When 7-year-old Amalya Knapp took the beam at the New Jersey state gymnastics finals last month, her excellent performance symbolized a far more complicated balancing act.

Although she would have ranked fifth in her age group, eligible for a medal, her individual scores were discounted. She was unable to compete on a Saturday because of her Orthodox Jewish family’s observance of the Sabbath.

“I was upset,” Amalya said, “but my mother told me there are decisions you have to make.”

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In a more nuanced way, a number of influential scholars, such as Rodney Stark and Regina Schwartz, have also cast monotheism as particularly intolerant towards the “Other” and thus a fertile ground for violence.

But I would like to ask whether there actually is an intrinsic link between monotheism and violence? Is such violence virtually inevitable?

There are a number of points that can be made in response to this question. The first is why is there such a preoccupation with religious and Monotheistic forms of violence, often to the point of dismissing secular violence? Why are violent secular causes often let off the hook?

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Anti-Semitism still rears its ugly head. The British designer John Galliano, for instance, has just been sacked as head designer of Christian Dior for an alleged anti-Jewish drunken rant in a Paris bar. His instant dismissal was perhaps commercially necessary. But it was morally justified too. At a meeting of the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee in Paris, the city’s Archbishop, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, said anti-Semitism must be “unambiguously exposed as a sin against God and humanity”, as it was “unfortunately, not dead”.

Traditionally across Europe, the most dangerous day of the year for Jews was Good Friday, as some of the prayers and readings used in churches that day could easily become an incitement to anti-Semitism. That changed when the Second Vatican Council decree Nostra Aetate specifically instructed that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”

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Pope Benedict has rejected the idea of collective Jewish guilt for Jesus Christ’s death, in a new book to be published next week.

Tackling an issue that has led to centuries of persecution, the Pope argues there is no basis in scripture for the Jewish people to be blamed.

The Catholic Church officially repudiated the idea in 1965.

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The historic reconciliation between Jews and Roman Catholics over the past 40 years should be extended to Muslims to deal with the challenges of the 21st century, a senior Jewish official has said.

The regular dialogue the two faiths have maintained since the Catholic Church renounced anti-Semitism at the Second Vatican Council, should be “a model for transformed relations with Islam,” Rabbi Richard Marker told an interfaith conference.

Marker addressed the opening session on Sunday evening of a meeting reviewing four decades of Catholic-Jewish efforts to forge closer ties after 1,900 years of Christian anti-Semitism and to ask how the dialogue can progress in the future.

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Nearly 70 years later, Athens, one of the last European capitals to commemorate those who perished at the hands of Nazi forces, finally has a Holocaust memorial.

But since its dedication in May, synagogues have been targeted, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, Holocaust monuments elsewhere in Greece vandalized and the Jewish Museum of Greece, in the capital, defaced with swastikas. What’s more, an alarming chunk of Athenians in November supported the election of a neo-Nazi candidate to the capital’s city council.

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A quick survey of priests, ministers, rabbis, and one imam made clear that social media were made for religion, in which connection and community are key.

“I love Facebook,” says Pastor Andrena Ingram of St. Michael’s Lutheran Church in Mount Airy. “You just reach everybody and anybody.” Like many religious congregations, St. Michael’s has a robust website. “When people come to visit us from out of town, very often it’s because they saw the website.”

On Facebook, Ingram posts news and announcements, and coordinates a youth group. She also runs a separate Facebook page “to minister to those both infected and affected with HIV,” connecting her with people as far away as Africa.

“It’s like a cyber-pastorship,” she says.

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In a San Antonio chapel last August, after reciting their wedding vows and exchanging their rings, Sally and Mark Austin prepared to receive communion for the first time as husband and wife. Just before they did, their minister asked them to sign a document. It was a ketubah, a traditional Jewish marriage contract.

The Austins’ was not an interfaith marriage. Nor was their ceremony some sort of multicultural mashup. Both Sally and Mark are evangelical Christians, members of Oak Hills Church, a nationally known megachurch. They were using the ketubah as a way of affirming the Jewish roots of their faith.

In so doing, the Austins are part of a growing phenomenon of non-Jews incorporating the ketubah, a document with millennia-old origins and a rich artistic history, into their weddings. Mrs. Austin, in fact, first learned about the ketubah from her older sister, also an evangelical Christian, who had been married five years earlier with not only a ketubah but the Judaic wedding canopy, the huppah.

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The architect of the Obama administration’s new consumer protection bureau met with faith-based groups Tuesday (Feb. 8) in a bid to shape the agency’s work as a moral crusade.

“The most recent financial crisis caused many to question the moral underpinnings of our financial dealings with each other,” Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard University law professor who was appointed last year to start the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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As Canadian youth continue their march toward secularism, with the majority of religious communities aging and shrinking, a small but steady trickle of secular Jewish youth have been heading in the opposite direction.

In what one scholar says is a movement of “tens of thousands of people” worldwide in the past two decades, Jewish youth raised in secular homes have been adopting Jewish Orthodoxy, one of the more demanding religious practices.

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Chaim Amsellem was certainly not the first Parliament member to suggest that most ultra-Orthodox men should work rather than receive welfare subsidies for full-time Torah study. But when he did so last month, the nation took notice: He is a rabbi, ultra-Orthodox himself, whose outspokenness ignited a fresh, and fierce, debate about the rapid growth of the ultra-religious in Israel.

“Torah is the most important thing in the world,” Rabbi Amsellem said in an interview. But now more than 60 percent of ultra-Orthodox men in Israel do not work, compared with 15 percent in the general population, and he argued that full-time, state-financed study should be reserved for great scholars destined to become rabbis or religious judges.

“Those who are not that way inclined,” he said, “should go out and earn a living.”

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….for many decades, most Jews in the United States have lost touch with those protocols ”” if they have ever heard of them ”” in favor of conventional funeral home services that replace volunteers with professionals who, by their nature, skip the more metaphysical and personal elements of the process.

Now, a movement to restore lost tradition has motivated a new generation of Jewish volunteers to learn a set of skills that was common knowledge for many of their great-grandparents: the rituals of bathing, dressing and watching over the bodies of neighbors and friends who have died.

It is a nationwide revival propelled in almost equal parts, experts say, by an emerging sense of mortality among baby boomers, a reaction against the corporate character of the funeral home industry and a growing cultural receptivity to past spiritual practices, even some that make many people squeamish.

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In these darkening days between Hanukkah and Christmas, here is a story to keep your spirits high ”” a story of cooperation between Jews and Christians, between people named Seinfeld and Samberg and people named Morgan and Lohan. A story of celebrities putting ethnic differences aside to raise money for charity.

By making fun of ”” or is that gently teasing? ”” Jews….

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Nearly 90 people appeared for the service in the temple’s social hall. Sadie sat near the front, near the Torah. She talked with Rabbi Ben, right in the middle of the service, about the best kind of instrument for announcing the new year. And it was O.K., Nancy Crown realized, sitting rows away. It was O.K. ”” Sadie was asking a question in temple, and nobody was shushing her.

Now Hanukkah has arrived, with its evocation of ancient miracles. This Sabbath morning, Sadie and her mother plan to attend the second special-needs worship service at Rodeph Sholom.

There is a phrase often used to describe autistic people ”” “on the spectrum” ”” and it can almost sound like a physical place, somewhere isolated and remote, except maybe when you can feel God, too, on the spectrum.

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The cruel truth is that Hanukkah is a seasonal festival of light in search of a pretext and as such is doomed to be forever the poor relation of Christmas. No comparable grandeur in the singing, no comparable grandeur in the giving, no comparable grandeur in the commemoration (no matter how solemn and significant the events we are remembering), in which even the candles are small and burn out pretty much the minute you light them.

In countries that turn snowy in December, Christmas has been brilliantly marketed. We see the baby Jesus shivering in his wintry crib, admire the twinkling lights in the Norwegian pines, and go out on to the snow on the new toboggan Santa brought us. It’s of a piece.

Compared to this, no matter how conscientiously we go on reinventing Hanukkah for the electronic age, exchanging animated Hanukkah messages by e-mail and sending one another links to Hanukkah YouTube videos, those Hasmoneans ”” who sound too hot for this time of the year ”” don’t have a chance of engaging our imaginations.

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