Tag: American Jews
The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending
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Stacey Zolt Hara was in her office in downtown San Francisco when a text from her 16-year-old daughter arrived: “I’m scared,” she wrote. Her classmates at Berkeley High School were preparing to leave their desks and file into the halls, part of a planned “walkout” to protest Israel. Like many Jewish students, she didn’t want to participate. It was October 18, 11 days after the Hamas invasion of southern Israel.
Zolt Hara told her daughter to wait in her
The Vanishing American Rabbi – The Atlantic
In November 2021, Temple Israel in Springfield, Missouri, began looking for a new rabbi. A quick perusal of job listings from other Reform synagogues left the search committee stunned: Scores of congregations, many offering higher salaries in larger cities, had been unable to fill their positions for months, sometimes longer. Eventually, Temple Israel entered into a fee-for-service agreement with a rabbi two hours away. He would come in for Shabbat, High Holiday services, and adult-education classes, but he
Trump Isn’t Merely Unhinged – The Atlantic
With apologies to a certain newspaper’s slogan, many of Donald Trump’s most dangerous statements hide in the plain light of day.
The problem is not that they don’t get reported on—they do—but even so, they are easy to tune out, perhaps because he’s been saying outlandish things for so long that people simply can’t bring themselves to parse the new ones; or perhaps because they’ve become accustomed, or at least numb, to his utterances; or perhaps because they don’t want
The Conflict in Gaza Is Polarizing Britain
How do you decide who owns a country? At 10:30 this morning in London, a group of black-clad men were gathered about 100 meters from the Cenotaph, Britain’s most famous war memorial. They were chanting. “We want our country back,” went one refrain, followed by “You’re not English, you’re not English, you’re not English anymore.”
This group was—as another of their chants put it—“Tommy’s Army.” That refers to Tommy Robinson, the pseudonym of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, a convicted mortgage fraudster who
The Israel-War Email That College Presidents Should’ve Sent
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Two friends, Petra and Rodrigo, are having an argument.
Petra thinks the world is best if people stay in their lane and do their job as best they can, narrowly construed. CEOs should try to maximize profits within the law. Emergency-room doctors should
The Book That Broke Judaism—And Tried to Put It Back Together
In the early 1970s, American Jews were, on the whole, centrist and conventional. Most were married, and most to other Jews. Their largest religious denomination was the Conservative movement, with its bland, spacious suburban synagogues, representing the middle ground between fusty tradition and full-forced reform. This was a community that seemed to have settled into a comfortable status quo, steadily assimilating in the postwar years and ascending into the middle class.
Still, there were signs that when it came to