By the middle of my post-high-school year of yeshiva study in Israel, it was obvious which of my classmates would return home much as they had left and which would return transformed. In the latter group were the boys who had begun to trade evenings at the bars on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street for the study hall, where they spent hours imbibing rabbinic wisdom. Their hair grew shorter and their sidelocks longer. Baseball caps declaring allegiance to the Yankees and Mets were replaced with velvet yarmulkes. Now they declared allegiance to a higher authority.

Religious transformations like these have become such a phenomenon in the Orthodox Jewish world that they have birthed their own derisive catchphrase. “Flipping Out,” a term first popularized by an Orthodox rock band, is now the title of a book published by Yashar Books in cooperation with New York’s Yeshiva University, the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy. Jews who identify themselves as Modern Orthodox keep kosher, observe the sabbath and practice other rituals but are otherwise well integrated into society, living and working among people of other faiths.

Read it all.

In one group photograph in the exhibit, young people on a ship that is taking them away from their families but also away from Hitler smile with delight. An equally telling photograph shows some settlers on the day after their arrival in Sosúa: Young men and women stand looking around with dumbfounded expressions on their faces; the women are wearing high heels and carrying handbags — hardly farm-appropriate gear. Their new predicament is aptly summed up in a quotation from refugee Walter Allison that appears between the pictures: “I could repair shoes, but I didn’t know how tomatoes grow.” Another refugee, Edith Gersten, humorously recounts a priceless Alice-in-Wonderland moment: “We stared at the cow. What happened next? Does one get hold of the tail and pump until somehow the milk comes out?”

But over time, the refugees adjusted to their new lives, building barracks and then homes. They celebrated Jewish and Dominican holidays with their neighbors, planted crops, made cheeses and (non-kosher) sausages, and learned Spanish. The Jews were delighted to find the Dominican community welcoming and completely free of anti-Semitism. The exhibit provides a glimpse, through video interviews, pictures and artifacts, into the refugees’ daily lives, from their attempts to re-create European café society to their struggles with tropical diseases. When the war ended, the majority of Sosúan settlers left for the U.S. or Israel, but others — many of the men having married Dominican women — stayed. The show concludes with a photograph of the current Sosúan Jewish community celebrating Hanukkah in 2007, using the same candelabra pictured in the barracks synagogue of the 1940s.

The exhibit holds important lessons in its comparatively small space. New York State Sen. Eric Schneiderman, along with the American Jewish Congress, originally approached the museum in 2004 with the idea to do an exhibit on Sosúa. Mr. Schneiderman represents a large Dominican population in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan, and he thought that this presentation would exemplify a positive experience shared by the Dominican and Jewish communities. Reflecting the inclusive nature of Sosúa itself, the exhibit is completely bilingual — for the first time in the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s history. Standing in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the museum raises implicit questions about the history of our own immigration policy simply by telling the story of one small nation that, for whatever reasons, stood up at a time when no one else did and opened its doors, saving lives that otherwise surely would have been lost.

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The United Methodist Church is poised to become the next U.S. church to consider divesting from Israel, a topic so controversial that it prompted the Presbyterian Church (USA) to backpedal on its own divestment program two years ago.

At its quadrennial General Conference this April in Fort Worth, Texas, the Methodists, with more than 8 million U.S. members, will debate whether to pull church holdings in Caterpillar, which provides the Israel Defense Forces with bulldozers.

The proposal from the Methodists’ General Board of Church and Society comes as the church’s women’s division offers a 224-page study guide on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has been slammed as “inflammatory, inaccurate and polemical” by Jewish groups

Read it all.

Could something like it happen again? That is invariably the first question that comes to mind when recalling that Hitler was given power in Germany 75 years ago last week. With the world now facing such great tensions and instability, the question seems more obvious than ever.

Hitler came to power in a democracy with a highly liberal Constitution, and in part by using democratic freedoms to undermine and then destroy democracy itself. That democracy, established in 1919, was a product of defeat in world war and revolution and was never accepted by most of the German elites, notably the military, large landholders and big industry.

Troubled by irreconcilable political, social and cultural divisions from the beginning, the new democracy survived serious threats to its existence in the early postwar years and found a semblance of stability from 1924 to 1928, only to be submerged by the collapse of the economy after the Wall Street crash of 1929.

The Nazis’ spectacular surge in popular support (2.6 percent of the vote in the 1928 legislative elections, 18.3 percent in 1930, 37.4 percent in July 1932) reflected the anger, frustration and resentment ”” but also hope ”” that Hitler was able to tap among millions of Germans. Democracy had failed them, they felt. Their country was divided, impoverished and humiliated. Scapegoats were needed.

It was easy to turn hatred against Jews, who could be made to represent the imagined external threat to Germany by both international capitalism and Bolshevism. Internally, Jews were associated with the political left ”” Socialist and Communist ”” which was made responsible by Hitler and his followers for Germany’s plight.

Read the whole opinion piece from last weekend.

Painful to watch but hauntingly powerful–warning, a number of images are very disturbing.

Rabbi ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): God is either the father of all men or of no man, and the idea of judging a person in terms of black or brown or white is an eye disease.

ABERNETHY: Heschel also publicly and passionately opposed the war in Vietnam.

Rabbi HESCHEL (from file footage, “The External Light,” NBC, 1972): How can I pray when I have on my conscience the awareness that I am co-responsible for the death of innocent people in Vietnam? In a free society, some are guilty, all are responsible

Read it all.

It is a story told in many versions, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says near the beginning of the new PBS series “The Jewish Americans,” “but mine is: What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s garment district and a U.S. Supreme Court justice? One generation.”

Ginsburg, 74, repeated the story last week at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington for an audience that watched clips of the series and then listened to Ginsburg speak of her heritage with filmmaker David Grubin.

“I am the beneficiary of being a Jewish American,” she told Grubin, the child of a father who immigrated at age 13 and a mother “conceived in the Old World and born in the New World.”

Ginsburg, who was raised in Brooklyn, said her first glimpse of anti-Semitism came during a drive with her parents down a country road, where she saw an “unsettling” sign outside an inn that instructed, “No dogs or Jews allowed.”

Read it all.

To be honest, it did not matter very much, because the significance of all miracles is not how they happen but what their effect is, and in this case the impact it had made on the despondent person who had felt hopeless and who now felt a new sense of enthusiasm.

Maybe the candle had been imperceptibly burning drowsily all along, but it had reminded him of the value of hope, the power of optimism, and opened his eyes to a more positive outlook on life. The incident had rekindled his spirits even if there was a thoroughly rational explanation to it all.

It is the same with us: often we are so weighed down with a problem that we cannot fathom out who we are or where we are heading; then something ? a candle, a person’s kind word, music from a passing car ? can clear the haze and help us to find a way forward. Often, it is a matter of inner blindness: being blind to the possibilities around us and then suddenly seeing the light.

That is the real miracle, without any thunderbolts overhead or earthquakes below, but when something inside us moves and our eyes are more open than they were before.

Read the whole piece.

There are no pews at Tikkun Leil Shabbat, no rabbis, no one with children or gray hair.

Instead, one rainy Friday night, the young worshipers sat in concentric circles in the basement of an office building, damp stragglers four deep against the walls. In the middle, Megan Brudney and Rob Levy played guitar, drums and sang, leading about 120 people through the full Shabbat liturgy in Hebrew.

Without a building and budget, Tikkun Leil Shabbat is one of the independent prayer groups, or minyanim, that Jews in their 20s and 30s have organized in the last five years in at least 27 cities around the country. They are challenging traditional Jewish notions of prayer, community and identity.

Read it all.

Westminster Abbey will hold its first ever Jewish-Christian service next weekend with a joint celebration of the festivals of Advent and Hanukkah.

Rabbi Mark Solomon of the liberal St John’s Wood Synagogue and the Abbey’s Canon Robert Reiss will do readings that will be interspersed with songs and carols from both faiths, and the lighting of candles.

The service, organised with the help of the Council of Christians, takes place next Sunday evening and is open to all members of the public.

Canon Reiss said: “Hanukkah and Advent occur at the same time of the year and both involve the lighting of candles. Westminster Abbey is very happy to respond to a suggestion from the Council for Christians and Jews that this joint event should take place, which will give an opportunity of representatives from both faiths to learn and understand of one another’s practices and, it is hoped, to share in the celebration of the light that flows from God.”

Read it all.

A headline last Sunday about a Muslim man and an Orthodox Jewish woman who are partners in two Dunkin’ Donuts stores described their religions incorrectly. The two faiths worship the same God ”” not different ones.

—From the New York Times “Corrections” section on November 25th; the original article to which it refers is here.

No crosses at the Western Wall was the message sent by a rabbi to a group of Austrian Catholic bishops who refused to hide their Christian crosses before entering the courtyard of the Western Wall, the Jewish people’s holiest prayer site.

Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch refused to give the bishops access to the site and avoided meeting the ecclesiastic delegation of approximately 20, led by Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schonborn.

Rabinovitch denied that the incident, which took place Thursday, smacked of religious intolerance.

“Crosses are a symbol that hurts Jewish feelings,” said Rabinovitch who refused to elaborate on precisely how or why the crosses were so offensive.

Read it all.

Last month, the Reform movement, the largest synagogue denomination in America, began shipping its long-awaited new prayer book, “Mishkan T’filah” to congregations. More than two decades in the making, “Mishkan T’filah” (literally, “A Dwelling for Prayer”) is billed by its editors as the first prayer book “of the people.” And the people have definitely had a say in its production, having tested out various incarnations at synagogues across the country and at several national conventions. If “Mishkan T’filah” is accepted as the standard prayer text in the movement’s 900 congregations, it could affect how more than a quarter of American Jews pray.

“Mishkan T’filah” replaces “Gates of Prayer,” released in 1975, which in a nod to the movement’s ethos of personal choice contained 10 different worship services from which individuals could choose. The new book offers only one. Its principal innovation is its design, a two-page layout in which each prayer is accompanied by a translation from the Hebrew, a transliteration, a commentary and a “spiritual reading”–all aimed at appealing to multiple orientations within the context of a single service.

Read it all.

In a communiqué, Dr Williams, Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, and Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger said that Christians and Jews should respond jointly to the Muslim letter.

“The ”˜Common Word’, though addressed to Christian Churches, also makes clear its respect for Hebrew scripture in citing directly from the Book of Deuteronomy, and in acknowledging the inspiration that this provided for their understanding of the Qur’anic teaching on the unity and love of God and of neighbour,” they said in the communiqué.

The communiqué also called for the furthering of “universal religious solidarity” by regarding places of worship, Christian, Jewish or those of other faiths, as “sacrosanct and therefore inviolate”.

The three religious leaders said they were “very concerned about the well-being of the ever-increasing number of refugees from Iraq, and the plight of religious minorities, in particular Christian communities in Iraq, and elsewhere in the region”.

Read it all.

From here:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is to make a brief visit to Israel this week to meet with the Chief Rabbis of Israel. Dr Williams will meet with Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger in Jerusalem on Wednesday.

The meeting fulfills the commitment made in the joint declaration of September 2006, which set out a framework for a formal dialogue between the Archbishop and the Chief Rabbinate. The agreement provided for meetings in alternate years at Lambeth and Jerusalem, and for the establishment of an Anglican-Jewish Commission. The leaders will consider the conclusions of the Anglican-Jewish Comission which met for the first time in July, when they discussed papers on the theme of the Sanctity of Life.

It is hoped that a communiqué will be issued at the conclusion of the meeting on Wednesday.

As we settled down for tea in his palatial North London home (a perk of the job), he came out fighting. “This book is probably politically incorrect in the highest order. And if it isn’t, well at least I intended it to be.”

If you expect a religious leader to be accessible, or give straightforward answers, think again in the case of Sir Jonathan. He makes a case for a Britain where there is greater integration but, crucially, without assimilation. To the layman at least, this argument, especially in the contentious case of faith schools, throws up more questions than answers.

I recognise the tension you’re talking about and it is a real tension,” he said. “And it’s the theme of the book. How do we create integration without assimilation? How can you be part of a larger entity without losing your identity? That’s the very narrow bridge that this book walks across.”

Read it all.

Multiculturalism has run its course, and it is time to move on. It was a fine, even noble idea in its time. It was designed to make ethnic and religious minorities feel more at home, more appreciated and respected, and therefore better able to mesh with the larger society. It affirmed their culture. It gave dignity to difference. And in many ways it achieved its aims. Britain is a more open, diverse, energising, cosmopolitan environment than it was when I was growing up.

But there has been a price to pay, and it grows year by year. Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation. It has allowed groups to live separately, with no incentive to integrate and every incentive not to. It was intended to promote tolerance. Instead the result has been, in countries where it has been tried, societies more abrasive, fractured and intolerant than they once were.

Liberal democracy is in danger. Britain is becoming a place where free speech is at risk, non-political institutions are becoming politicised, and a combination of political correctness and ethnic-religious separatism is eroding the graciousness of civil society. Religious groups are becoming pressure groups. Boycotts and political campaigns are infecting professional bodies. Culture is fragmenting into systems of belief in which civil discourse ends and reasoned argument becomes impossible. The political process is in danger of being abandoned in favour of the media-attention-grabbing gesture. The politics of freedom risks descending into the politics of fear.

Read it all.

In the center of this quaint New England town, where the green is surrounded by antique shops, boutiques and restaurants, not much changes without the blessing of the Historic District Commission.

In the past, the commission has gone so far as to order the removal of flower boxes from the front of homes. And it is entangled in a lawsuit initiated by a homeowner who replaced a 19th-century door with a window.

But little has rattled this community like plans by Chabad Lubavitch of Litchfield County, an Orthodox Jewish organization, to turn a Victorian house into the town’s first synagogue.

Rabbi Joseph Eisenbach, the spiritual leader of the Chabad, presented his plans ”” which include replacing the slate foundation with stone and building a steeple to display the Star of David ”” to the commission last month, and was met with stiff opposition.

Read it all.

What is it about Arendt’s Jewish writings and persona that have rendered them so peculiarly divisive, and emotionally and ideologically charged? This too is related to her predilection to resist easy classification and simple self-definition, to question ideological platitudes, to provoke and to hold contradictory (some would say, perverse) positions. She incisively dissected the rise of modern political anti-Semitism ”“ yet seemed to hold the Jews partly responsible for its emergence and success. She was ideologically and institutionally identified with the Zionist movement (it may come as a shock to recall that, in 1941, her later bête noire, Gershom Scholem, described her as “a wonderful woman and an extraordinary Zionist”) ”“ and one of its most severe critics. She was one of the earliest and most concerned analysts of the “Final Solution” ”“ yet, for many, her analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s banality and her indictment of the complicity of the Jewish Councils in the extermination process rendered her more of an enemy than a friend of the Jewish people.

The same complexity applied as much to Arendt’s personal life choices as it did to her philosophical positions. If her committed Jewish identity and politics seemed self-evident ”“ the last chapter of her early work on Rachel Varnhagen is entitled “One Does Not Escape Jewishness” ”“ Arendt always took care to challenge the non-reflective, self-celebratory nature of group affiliations. She took great pride in the complex and critical, perhaps even subversive, nature of her own intertwined commitments. Of her relationship to her second husband, the German radical and non-Jew, Heinrich Blücher, she wrote in 1946: “If I had wanted to become respectable I would either have had to give up my interest in Jewish affairs or not marry a non-Jewish man, either option equally inhuman and in a sense, crazy”. Her Jewish identification was strong and passionate ”“ “I belong to the Jews”, she declared, “beyond dispute or agreement” ”“ but was never absolute. It was most clear and decisive under conditions of persecution, where, as she put it, one had to “resist only in terms of the identity that is under attack”. “Politically”, she stated in 1946, “I will speak only in the name of the Jews”, but she immediately qualified this by adding, “whenever circumstances force me to give my nationality”. It is precisely this deep yet ambiguous involvement in existentially crucial Jewish matters, indeed, her partial “insider” status that still endow her, for many, with a troubling, even threatening, relevance. As a “connected critic”, a member of the family rather than an outsider or enemy, her arguments have standing and authority; they demand engagement rather than simple dismissal.

Read it all.

His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine ”” as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.

They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.

He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style ”” and his clerical collar.

The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.

Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.

“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors ”” without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”

Such noble, astonishingly difficult work. Read it all.

It’s the most famous pun in the history of the foreign office. In 1842, Major General Sir Charles Napier, commander of the British army in India, was ordered to quell an uprising in a province called Sindh, today the region around Karachi in Pakistan. He succeeded, and sent back a message consisting of one word, Peccavi, which is the Latin for ‘I have sinned.’

Puns aside, the hardest thing to say in any language is just that: I have sinned. I did wrong. Forgive me. Which is why, in Judaism, we have Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which begins this Friday night.

For us, it’s the holiest day of the year, and it is given over to saying in a hundred different ways, I have sinned.

It isn’t easy to do. But it’s essential to a happy life. I have seen marriages fail, families split apart, friends become estranged, whole communities divided, all because neither side was prepared to say: I got it wrong. Forgive me.

Read it all.

The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, begins this Wednesday night. We call the time from then to the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, the “ten days of repentance” and they are the supreme moments of holiness of Jewish time. The theme of these days is apology and forgiveness. We confess our sins, ask to be forgiven, and pray that we may be given another year of life to try again and do better next time.

Of all virtues, forgiveness is among the most important, and its absence the most destructive. I have known marriages fail, families divided and communities split apart simply because the two sides could not bring themselves to forgive and ask to be forgiven. Why should they? After all, they were in the right and the others in the wrong. That is how self-righteousness wrecks lives.

All the more so on a larger scale, within or between nations. In the run-up to the conflict in Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic and Franjo Tudjman manipulated the stories that Serbs and Croats told about themselves, each portraying his group as heroic victims. Milosevic in particular played on the theme of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.

Unforgiveness has a long memory. As Ogden Nash said, nobody forgets where he buried the hatchet.

Read it all.

Hatred of Jews has reached new heights in Europe and many points south and east of the old continent. Last year I chaired a blue-ribbon committee of British parliamentarians, including former ministers and a party leader, that examined the problem of anti-Semitism in Britain. None of us are Jewish or active in the unending debates on the Israeli-Palestinian question.

Our report showed a pattern of fear among a small number of British citizens — there are around 300,000 Jews in Britain, of whom about a third are observant — that is not acceptable in a modern democracy. Synagogues attacked. Jewish schoolboys jostled on public transportation. Rabbis punched and knifed. British Jews feeling compelled to raise millions to provide private security for their weddings and community events. On campuses, militant anti-Jewish students fueled by Islamist or far-left hate seeking to prevent Jewish students from expressing their opinions.

More worrisome was what we described as anti-Jewish discourse, a mood and tone whenever Jews are discussed, whether in the media, at universities, among the liberal media elite or at dinner parties of modish London. To express any support for Israel or any feeling for the right of a Jewish state to exist produces denunciation, even contempt.

Our report sent a shock wave through the British government. Tony Blair called us in and told his staff to fan out throughout government departments and produce answers to the problems we outlined. To Britain’s credit, the Blair administration produced a formal government response setting out tough new guidelines for the police to investigate anti-Semitic attacks and for universities to stop anti-Jewish ideology from taking root on campuses. Britain’s Foreign Office has been told to protest to Arab states that allow anti-Jewish broadcasts.

Read it all.

Religious denominations have learned that rewriting their prayer books can result in rebellions from their worshipers, both those wedded to tradition and those hoping for dramatic change.

Now the nation’s largest Jewish movement, Reform Judaism, is preparing to adopt a new prayer book that was intended to offer something for everyone ”” traditionalists, progressives and everyone else ”” even those who do not believe in God.

The changes reveal a movement that is growing in different directions simultaneously, absorbing non-Jewish spouses and Jews with little formal religious education while also trying to appeal to Jews seeking a return to tradition.

Traditional touches coexist with a text that sometimes departs from tradition by omitting or modifying some prayers and by using language that is gender-neutral. References to God as “He” have been removed, and whenever Jewish patriarchs are named ”” like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, so are the matriarchs ”” like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. The prayer book took more than 20 years to develop and was tested in about 300 congregations. Its release has been delayed for a year because the initial printed product was shoddy, said people involved with the project. But the book is expected to be released in about a month ”” too late, however, for the High Holy Days, which begin Sept. 13.

“It reflects a recognition of diversity within our community,” said Rabbi Elyse D. Frishman, the editor of the prayer book. “We have interfaith families. We have so many visitors at b’nai mitzvah ceremonies that I could have a service on Shabbat morning where a majority of people there aren’t Jewish,” she said, referring to bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies on Saturday mornings.

Read it all.

For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.

There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn’t want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.

Nazi memories return. She didn’t explain the nightmares that woke her, screaming, in the long string of cramped apartments the family called home after resettling in Detroit and then Los Angeles.

Instead, the university-educated Hebrew teacher who spoke seven languages regaled her daughters with stories about her “beautiful life” before Hitler’s armies stormed Poland, successfully locking the war years away until 1998.

That was when her second husband died. When she began to lose her battle with dementia. When she became convinced that the soldiers were coming for her, as they’d done so many years before.

Read it all.

Susan Rosenfeld’s marriage wasn’t what you’d call romantic. She was thrown up against a wall, doused with a bucket of cold water in bed, and, toward the end, became her husband’s punching bag. “Since I wear long sleeves, no one really knew,” she says. Looking back, Ms. Rosenfeld regrets keeping the abuse a secret. But “in the Jewish community, you don’t call the police on your husband.”

In her mid-30s, Ms. Rosenfeld hopes to remarry and build a new life for herself. But as an Orthodox Jew, a civil divorce is not sufficient. For Ms. Rosenfeld to be officially released from her vows, her husband has to grant her a Jewish bill of divorce, called a get. The document, which certifies the termination of the marriage–the Aramaic text declares “you are hereby permitted to marry any man”–not only allows women to remarry, but ensures that future children will not be deemed mamzerim (bastards able to marry only other mamzerim).

Two years have passed and Ariel HaCohen, Ms. Rosenfeld’s husband, has refused to grant her the get. This makes Ms. Rosenfeld an aguna–literally, an anchored woman–trapped in a dead marriage.

Read it all.

(ACNS)

The first meeting of the Anglican Jewish Commission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel took place at the seat of the Chief Rabbis in Jerusalem on Sunday 1st and Monday 2nd July 2007. The Commission had been put in place under the provisions of the joint declaration of the Archbishop and the Chief Rabbis at Lambeth Palace on 6th September 2006. The discussions took place within the framework of the joint declaration made on that occasion which said that: “Our relationship is unique, not only historically and culturally, but also scripturally and for both religions is rooted in the one overarching covenant of God with Abraham to which God remains faithful through all time”¦”¦.This will be a dialogue of mutual respect in which we seek only to understand each other better and to strengthen our own communities and their affection and respect for each other”.

Read it all.

Update: There is more here as well.

Sorting out ways to live Jewishly in a big city – and sharing their experience with other young adults – has just brought Rebecca Karp, 25, and Becky Coren, 23, together with Vassar in a Center City townhouse they will share for at least a year.

Coren, a second-year law student at Rutgers/Camden, calls theirs a “holistic, grassroots pursuit of religion.”

Their experiment is so relaxed and so new (three weeks) that the three haven’t yet affixed a mezuzah to the doorway, although that might happen Sunday at their open house “kickoff” barbecue.

Read it all.

I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals’ predicament seems absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a “scientific” doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for the evangelicals’ sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.

Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the fourth such “day.” Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact to be respected like the laws of physics ”” guided by God but effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. “The truth is,” he said, “despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time believing that man could be descended from monkeys.”

This same grappling with tension ”” and the same failure to resolve it perfectly ”” can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.

The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make sense of the problem of marriage ”” which is also, for me, the most personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is especially definitive.

Read it all.

Update: Jewcy has a Q and A with Noah Feldman here.

That’s the headline to an article in the Observer which picks up on one of the more interesting angles to the story re: Pope Benedict’s decision on the Latin Mass:

Pope’s move on Latin mass ‘a blow to Jews’

Sunday July 8, 2007
The Observer

Jewish leaders and community groups criticised Pope Benedict XVI strongly yesterday after the head of the Roman Catholic Church formally removed restrictions on celebrating an old form of the Latin mass which includes prayers calling for the Jews to ‘be delivered from their darkness’ and converted to Catholicism.

In a highly controversial concession to traditionalist Catholics, Pope Benedict said that he had decided to allow parish priests to celebrate the Latin Tridentine mass if a ‘stable group of faithful’ request it – though he stressed that he was in no way undoing the reforms of the Sixties Second Vatican Council which allowed the mass to be said in vernacular languages for the first time.

‘What earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful,’ Benedict wrote.

However, the older rite’s prayers calling on God to ‘lift the veil from the eyes’ of the Jews and to end ‘the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ’ – used just once a year during the Good Friday service – have sparked outrage.

Yesterday the Anti-Defamation League, the American-based Jewish advocacy group, called the papal decision a ‘body blow to Catholic-Jewish relations’.

‘We are extremely disappointed and deeply offended that nearly 40 years after the Vatican rightly removed insulting anti-Jewish language from the Good Friday mass, it would now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words by praying for Jews to be converted,’ said Abraham Foxman, the group’s national director, in Rome. ‘It is the wrong decision at the wrong time. It appears the Vatican has chosen to satisfy a right-wing faction in the church that rejects change and reconciliation.’

The rest of the article is here.