“The program that is now known as Taglit-Birthright Israel was launched in late 1999–early 2000. The Israeli parliamentarian Yossi Beilin had proposed the idea almost a decade earlier. He wanted to change the Israel-Diaspora relationship from Israel being a supplicant … [Read More]
Category Archives: 2010
“American Modern Orthodoxy consists of at least two distinct types, an intellectual and a sociological one. Intellectual Modern Orthodoxy has an ideology of joining the best of Western civilization with a commitment to Jewish law and traditional Jewish values. It … [Read More]
According to Arnold Eisen—the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS)—The Conservative Movement faces three major challenges related to message, quality control and structure. When Eisen speaks throughout the United States and Canada to Conservative Jews, he says, many of … [Read More]
“The work of the (non-Jewish) sociologist Peter Berger offers an illuminating context for considering the overarching situation that confronts American Judaism in general and Reform in particular. In his book, The Heretical Imperative, Berger points out that in the pluralistic … [Read More]
“Until a few decades ago, Jewish women were literally written out of Jewish history. The Encyclopedia Judaica, published in the 1960s, contained biographies of some women, but in scholarly articles individual women and the role of women as a group … [Read More]
American support for Israel historically has rested on four main pillars: the high esteem Jews enjoy within American society; the strong base of Christianity within American culture; the kinship Americans have for a fellow democracy; and, especially since 9/11, the … [Read More]
“For the first time there are many cases of three and even four generations of Jewish families who are alive simultaneously in the United States. During the great wave of immigration of East European Jews from 1880 to 1920, families … [Read More]
Introduction Jewish men and women in the United States have become characterized by a gender imbalance that differs from most Jewish communities historically and from many other Jewish communities around the world today. In liberal Jewish America, women have become … [Read More]
Twenty-five percent of all American Jews live in the Western United States, representing a distinctive and growing voice within Jewish life. Participation and identity in these communities show different features from the rest of American Jewry, in part reflecting the … [Read More]
More than 50 American Jewish federations completed local Jewish community studies from 1993 to 2010. Below examples are cited of how the results of these studies have been utilized to guide Jewish community decision-making.1 The North American Jewish Data Bank … [Read More]