Ask The Rabbis | Can a Robot Be Jewish?
“Would your Jewish robot be like the Jetsons’ Rosie, who’d make perfect Shabbat challah and your aunt’s amazing latkes?”...
Series
Persecuted In Pakistan
14:51 08 May
in 2018 May/June, Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative, In the News, Religion, World
Accused of blasphemy for practicing—or even affirming—their faith, Ahmadis still cling to the country they helped establish....
Ask The Rabbis | Has Israel Changed Judaism?
“When Jews gathered as religious communities, we didn't have to tolerate significant differences: When we disagreed, we just founded a new synagogue with the like-minded. The political arena demands something different. ” INDEPENDENT Judaism is an alter kocker. It doesn’t change. It only gets more wrinkles. Rather...
Seven Dishes for Seven Decades
The long tradition of Jewish food, wrote culinary historian Gil Marks, has always been one of “transforming and transferring,” and Israeli food is no exception. On Israel’s 70th anniversary, we look at Israeli history through food: We selected seven dishes, one for each decade. A...
Visual Moment | The Ringelblum Archive
Even before the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-1943) knew of the “Final Solution,” they understood that their story needed to be preserved. Under the leadership of Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, a clandestine organization of about 60 researchers with the code name Oyneg Shabes (“the...
Ask The Rabbis | Should Jews at the Seder Ask God to Smite Our Enemies?
Pour out Your wrath upon the nations that know You not, and upon the families that call not on Your name; for they have devoured Jacob, yea, they have devoured him and consumed him, and have laid waste his habitation...
Talk of the Table | A Naturally Gluten-Free Holiday
For many Jews, Passover is about what you can’t eat. Those who observe the holiday’s dietary rules must avoid chametz: wheat, rye, spelt, barley or oats. But because these ingredients—with the exception, sometimes, of oats—also happen to be the primary sources of gluten in our...
An Artist’s Secret, Now Fully Revealed
When Charlotte (called Lotte by her family) was eight years old, her mother died. At the time she was told the cause was influenza—the truth was kept a carefully guarded secret....
A Tu B’Shevat Seder for Mystics
The epigram, “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!” sometimes serves as a tongue-in-cheek synopsis of Jewish holidays: Passover, for example, recounts the original Jewish survival story in an extended banquet punctuated by four cups of wine. ...
Ask The Rabbis | How Would You Counsel A Sexual Predator?
In every contact with serial bullies, victimizers or predators, we must carefully balance natural empathy for the person before us with solidarity and justice concerning the victims. Teshuvah (repentance) is always the goal, yet false expressions of remorse are an abuser’s modus operandi. INDEPENDENT Many a predator...