A women's prayer group was expelled from the area of Jerusalem's Western Wall on Wednesday for wearing tallitot and reading from the Torah, in violation of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that restricts these activities to men in the area directly in front of the wall. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the majority of non-Orthodox rabbinical students are female, with the Reform movement being the most female-dominated, leaving some communities struggling to revitalize men's participation in the religion.
posted by albrecht on Nov 20, 2009 - 51 comments

The manuscripts of David Kaufmann, Jewish scholar extraordinaire. Wonderful illuminations, inventive typography and even a little bit of naughtiness.
posted by tellurian on Jan 21, 2009 - 8 comments

For Orthodox Jewish mothers with small children, the Shabbat can be challenging. The answer, for many communities, is the establishment of an eruv (discussed previously here, in passing). This San Francisco Chronicle article details the history behind Berkeley, California's unique instance. This isn't the first time an eruv has been attempted in the Bay Area: the failed effort to create one in Palo Alto was covered by the Chronicle, as well as the Jewish News Weekly. Berkeley isn't the only United States city with an eruv—the Boston eruv maintains a large list of domestic and international eruvim—nor is it the city with the most unusual eruv, or even the largest. Inevitably, perhaps, there's a blog entirely dedicated to the subject of eruvim, and vigorous commentary on the subject from several others.
posted by scrump on Jul 7, 2006 - 60 comments

The War For Hasidic Williamsburg: Immediately after the recent death of the Satmar Grand Rebbe his two sons went to war over over which one will be the new leader of what is perhaps the largest Hasidic sect in the United States. This sect is extremely anti-modernist, even compared to other Hasidic groups, and it also strongly anti-Zionist. A former leader of the Satmars once blamed the Holocaust on the Zionist campaign for a Jewish homeland. But this internal battle is not the only threat to the community. The gentrification of Brooklyn (warning: pdf link) has both driven up the price of land, making it extremely difficult for the large families of the Satmar to obtain additional housing, and made it far more difficult for the youth to escape the corrupting moral values of the outside culture.
posted by spira on May 6, 2006 - 35 comments

"It is absurd to talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition".
I had been born in the United States but didn't know any English because none was spoken at home or in the streets. We were a solid enclave of some 600,000 Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jews. But I still remember one day that a missionary came to the door with what I still have my copy of: a Yiddish translation of the New Testament. There's a kind of grim joke in that, isn't there? In the mere existence of it.
Harold Bloom on religion in America, God smoking a cigar, and who really is the King of the Jews.
posted by matteo on Dec 4, 2005 - 72 comments

Red, White and Jew --an examination of 6 issues facing the American Jews of today and tomorrow, religious and non, from the holocaust as history to Israel fatigue to Jewish conservatives.
...We can finally be Jewish and American, but somewhere along the line nobody bothered to figure out entirely what that meant. So it falls to us, the next Jewish generation, to balance the scales. Will we be more Jewish, more American, or a fusion of the two? More importantly, how will we do it?
posted by amberglow on Jun 16, 2003 - 23 comments

Ask the rabbi...about storing your ammo. I love the total randomness of this, including the fact that it's all coming to you from Wisconsin, the Badger State.
posted by luser on May 9, 2001 - 8 comments