When Jews Are Told We Don’t Belong

Remember when Jews were excluded from universities, law firms, hospitals, country clubs, neighborhoods, and entire professions? Remember the quotas at Ivy League schools designed specifically to keep Jewish students out? Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and others openly limited Jewish enrollment because there were “too many Jews.” Remember the signs that read “No Jews Allowed” at resorts, […]

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A Bisl Torah — God’s Emergent Voice

There is a tradition to stay up late on Shavuot: studying and pouring over the texts of our tradition. The ritual is said to have come from the hevruta between Rabbi Yosef Caro and Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz. They and a few other great scholars learned with intensity, fervor, and spirit. As they bantered through the […]

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The Medieval Logic Behind Modern Anti-Israel Lies

There was a time when Jews were accused of poisoning wells, spreading plague, murdering Christian children for ritual purposes and concealing monstrous moral depravity beneath a civilized exterior. The details changed by century and geography. The structure rarely did. And one of the most uncomfortable truths about those episodes is that the accusations were never […]

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The Book and the Sword

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy entered common usage through the Septuagint, a Jewish translation of the Bible into Greek. These names are rough translations of ones used in early Rabbinic literature and are in fact rooted in the Jewish tradition.‌ In this older system, each name corresponds to the theme of the book. The […]

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A Bisl Torah — Your Time Capsule

I’ve noticed a few schools encouraging the graduating class to create a time capsule. A newspaper headlining a major moment of that year may be included. Perhaps a trendy piece of clothing or something representing an inside joke. But what if the time capsule included items that represented the students’ values? Perhaps a Magen David […]

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Michigan Mischief

It has been a busy time for combatants and spectators in the campus free speech wars. As I was drafting a comment about the University of Michigan, we got word that Northwestern University President Emeritus Morton Schapiro canceled his plan to deliver an invited address and receive an honorary degree from Georgetown University Law School, […]

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