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A Vote for MERCAZ USA: Slate #2 Is a Vote for Conservative Judaism and for Israel
I write to urge you to support MERCAZ USA: Slate #2 (Masorti / Conservative Movement) in the World Zionist Organization (WZO) elections that are taking place now through the month of April.
At the first-ever Israeli conference devoted to the religious thought and political activism of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, former professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at JTS, which took place in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, my subject was the talk that Heschel himself gave in Jerusalem in 1957 at a conference of world Jewish leaders gathered by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and future president Zalman Shazar.
As I was driving in Tel Aviv the other day, a commercial came on the radio that caused me to sit up and take notice. It featured “Ma’oz Tzur” sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” followed by a resonant male voice that asked the listener to imagine what might happen if Santa Claus lit Hanukkah candles this year. Many Israelis are making a similar move, the announcer continued, trading in German-made automobiles for Cadillacs: “Shouldn’t you think of joining them?”
From Toronto to Hollywood in Search of the Key to Jewish Cultural Survival
Author David Bezmozgis, in dialogue with me a few weeks ago before an overflow audience at Beth Tzedec Congregation in Toronto, put his finger on a basic point of Diaspora Jewish life that to my mind is too often skirted, ignored, or denied.
It’s not often that a museum makes history as well as chronicles it, and rare too when otherwise cautious observers, chastened by the repeated experience of expectations gone awry, remark at the opening of a new museum that it may prove a source of hope and pride that propels an entire society forward.
High Holiday Message from Chancellor Arnold M. Eisen
This has been a momentous and disturbing year for Jews who care about the future of their people and their tradition. 5774 began with news of prestigious research that cast doubt on the vitality and viability of the Jewish community in America.
The last time air raid sirens blared across Israel at the approach of incoming missiles fired from Gaza, in December 2012—a conflict that, as awful as it was, inflicted less suffering on both sides than the current war—I happened to be in Israel for a round of meetings.
Response to the Presbyterian Divestment from Israel
Lovers of irony might savor the fact that the vote by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) to divest from three US companies doing business in Israel came exactly a week after news broke of the kidnapping—apparently by Hamas terrorists pledged to the destruction of Israel—of three teenage yeshiva students on the West Bank.
At least one thing has changed between last Yom Ha’atzma’ut and this one in the relationship between many American Jews and Israel: we have read and thought about two challenging and highly personal books that came out this year on the subject of the past, present, and possible futures of the Zionist project.
I’ve been thinking about marriage since I first started thinking about what adulthood might be like. Even as a young teenager I knew that my parents’ marriage, while loving and stable, could not in many respects provide the model for my own.
