Diaspora Nation: Rethinking Zionism Today themedialine.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from themedialine.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Almost immediately after learning that the unique Jewish adult education center HaMaqom would be closing, Rachel and David Biale Jewish educators with links to the Berkeley institution since its founding in the 1970s knew they had to do something.
“Lehrhaus has been what I would call the crown jewel of the Bay Area Jewish community for 47 years,” David Biale said, referring to the center’s former name for 45 of those years (it was changed to HaMaqom | The Place in 2019). “It fulfills a very important need in the community. To see it disappear feels just wrong.”
Founded as Lehrhaus Judaica in 1974, HaMaqom announced in a June 17 press release that it would be permanently shutting its doors at the end of the summer. Board president Lisa Douglass said at the time that the decision to dissolve the nonprofit had been “extraordinarily difficult,” adding that she believed it was “not the end [but] a new beginning for our programs, staff, and extraordinary educators.”
Take down the Israeli flag – Mondoweiss mondoweiss.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mondoweiss.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In his best-selling book,
The Year of Living Biblically, secular Jew A. J. Jacobs endeavors to follow biblical laws literally for a year. His escapades with mixed fabrics, stoning Sabbath-breakers, handling serpents, and honoring widows are enthralling and often sidesplitting, and they led to a CBS sitcom spinoff.
In one entry, he explains his attempt to avoid the ritual impurity associated with genital discharges while his wife is menstruating (Lev. 15:19–23). Unamused, she makes it a point to sit in every chair in the house before he returns home. Ultimately, he opts for a portable Handy Seat, because really, who can be sure who might have just sat in any particular subway seat or restaurant booth? (Rachel Held Evans completed a similar tongue-in-cheek challenge in her 2012 book,
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It has become more and more common that politicians, religious leaders, and laypeople discuss America through this lens, such as stating “America was founded & grew strong on a bedrock of Judeo-Christian values.”
There’s a few major issues with statements like this. The first, which I think may be one of the more important in our political climate is that America was not founded on a “Judeo-Christian” value system: