“I plead with everyone on our campus to be careful and vigilant against legitimate debate turning into anger, then to hatred and demonization, and invidious discrimination.
I can say that Jewish students are feeling this, and it’s wrong. I feel it, and it’s wrong.”
Source: “President Bollinger Condemns Anti-Semitism in a Statement Before the Senate Plenary” (Columbia University)
“While there’s plenty of TV and books that I love about American Jewry, I rarely saw (and still rarely see) myself or my family in them. Almost inevitably, they define ‘American Jew’ in a very specific way. That definition assumes a number of things: an English-speaking house (maybe with an allowance for a German- or Yiddish-speaking bubbe), a settled middle class existence, and participation in a cultural narrative that almost inevitably leads back to a turn of the century tenement. There’s an assumption that we were immigrants, past tense. In our dominant cultural narratives, immigrant Jews, ESL Jews, and second-generation Jews stopped existing in America about 50 years ago.”
(more…)“Shortly after his 90th birthday as I was leaving his house, he called from the doorway: ‘Hurry back Rabbi. There is a lot to learn, and the sun is setting.‘”
Source: Rabbi David Wolpe, “Studying the Bible with Kirk Douglas” (The New York Times)
“Assuming that the staples of a Tanakh (Bible), a prayer book, and a Passover Haggadah are already on hand, here are five more books that I’d recommend for any Jewish library.”
Source: my own contribution to Moment magazine’s Five Books Project
This week, I finished reading Abby Chava Stein’s Becoming Eve, which includes a powerful description of a meeting between Stein’s father and Rabbi David Ingber. Thus, an extensive mention of Rabbi Ingber in today’s Jewish Insider caught my attention perhaps even more forcefully than it might have.
The newsletter mention focused on the rabbi’s latest sermon, which you can pick up at the 1:15 mark below.
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