Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives at Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include the newly released "Jewish Roots of American Liberty," "The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada," "Esther in America," "Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth" and "Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States."
As Daniel Ross Goodman notes in his recently published “Soloveitchik’s Children,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik wrote early and often of Jewish dialectics — the dynamic tension of holding oppositional ideas in tandem.
Few Americans realize that as the Jewish community begins reading the book of Exodus in the weekly Torah cycle, the text being studied is actually one of the political and moral founding documents of the United States.
Best to make like Jacob’s favorite son and realize that it’s less about how we dress and more about what we dream.
Seven hundred years or so before those famous freedom fighters liberated Jerusalem from the hands of the nefarious Syrian-Greek forces of Antiochus IV, there was Elisha.
In considering Jacob’s actions in this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, in light of Israel’s ongoing war against the Hamas terrorists, it is worth reviewing emergent themes in the history of Jews and military conflict prior to 1948.
In the collection of traditions known as Bereshit Rabbah, the Jewish sages offered a radical reading of the patriarch Jacob’s starry night. In it they sensed the scientific formula for nothing less than Jewish survival.
The rabbinic renderings of Og should serve as a helpful guide to those composing the coming generation of screen content.
In Koren’s threefold cord of commentaries on Kohelet, seasons of students have been given interpretive riches with which to sharpen their thinking as they turn the pages of the musings of a monarch from millennia ago — about life, its limits, its possibilities, and what truly matters under the sun.
This spring, on March 19, 2023, Yeshiva University, in a historic collaboration across multiple organizations and multiple faiths, is convening a conference called “Restoring the American Story” for high school educators on its Wilf campus in New York City.
The infrastructure measure’s millions of beneficiaries would be wise to consider how an ancient biblical national project of renewal, observed this year in Israel, might shape the cultural impact of the changes to come.
