If you think the widening chasm between the rich and the rest spells trouble for American democracy, have a look at the growing gulf between the information-rich and -poor.
In the great, century-long love affair between America and the Jews, it’s tempting to assume that Jewish and American values are perfectly aligned.
“Who is a Jew?” is a uniquely Jewish question. It is a question that epitomizes the Jewish people and culture. It is a philosophical question that embodies the history of Jewish debate. It is a question of belonging that symbolizes Jews as a minority.
Of the 3,977 angry e-mails I received last week, one stood out. “I am a Jew, a member of Temple Emanuel in Los Angeles, and the founder of the largest local, grass-roots Tea Party group in Los Angeles called the Hancock Park Patriots,” Mark Sonnenklar wrote.
There’s a nasty food fight going on right now in the Orthodox world between the stringent groups and the more open ones.
The ink is barely dry on the latest Pew report on declining Jewish affiliation and concerned community leaders are quickly weighing in on what to do to attract the unaffiliated back under the tent. Notwithstanding all the good ideas, something, from my experience, is missing from the conversation.
It seems like almost everyone in our community — with the exception of a few on the extreme right and the far left — supports the two-state solution as the only way to solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
The historian Simon Rawidowicz wrote a famous essay in which he described Jews, with our constant fear of extinction as the “ever-dying” people. He wrote the essay 27 years ago, does that make him wrong or prophetic?
Last week, the Pew Research Center released the first national demographic study of Jewish Americans in more than a decade. Like all such studies, there are disagreements at the edges about the accuracy of some of the results, but the study’s most significant findings have been generally accepted.
Since the release of the Pew report on American Jews, the question I’ve been asked most often is what surprises me about it.
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