What is the Future of Religious Freedom in the United States?

We talk to some of the “rock stars” of First Amendment scholarship: Marci Hamilton, Charles Haynes, Douglas Laycock, David Saperstein, Marc Stern, Jeffrey Toobin, Asma Uddin and others to explore contested issues—from contraception to sharia—and shed light on what they think will happen next.

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Wine Talk of the Table

Wine: Ambrosia of the Jews

The Torah is full of oenophiles: One of Noah’s first actions after emerging from the ark is to plant a vineyard, and the Five Books mention wine at least 16 times along with grain and olive oil as the fundamental economic and nutritive commodities of ancient Israel. In the Talmud, the second-century scholar Rabbi Meir even wonders whether a grape was the seductive fruit of Eden. Grapes were a natural agricultural fit for ancient Israel, given the land’s climate, and wine production grew into a well-developed industry. In the town of Gibeon, about 4.5 miles north of Jerusalem, archaeologists in the 1950s and 1960s discovered underground wine-making facilities dating to the pre-Babylonian period, including clay jugs inscribed in ancient Hebrew with the names of vineyard owners and towns to which the wine was to be delivered....

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Anat Hoffman Dares to Take On Israel’s Orthodox Establishment. Can She Win?

A visionary to some, a troublemaker to others, Anat Hoffman is leading the charge for women to be allowed to read the Torah at the Western Wall. The executive director of the Israel Reform Action Committee and spokesperson for Women of the Wall has become the face of the fight for religious freedom in Israel.

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From the Editor

One could argue that Israel is the country where non-Orthodox Jews have the least religious freedom: They can’t marry, divorce or convert according to their own religious preferences. Welcome to Moment’s religious freedom issue. I’d like to be able to report that religious freedom in the world is on the rise, but sadly, the facts don’t support this. Indeed, there was a growing tide of restrictions on religion between 2009 and 2010, as tallied in a new study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Overall the study shows that fewer people have the rights laid out in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion,” including “freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom either alone or in community with others and in public or...

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