Why Israel Needs a Nation-State Law
A bulwark against judicial activism.
July 24, 2018
No, an Israeli Rabbi Wasn’t Arrested for Performing Non-Orthodox Weddings
Setting the record straight on the Haiyun affair.
At 5:30 Thursday morning, police knocked on the door of Dov Haiyun, an Israeli Conservative rabbi, and summoned him for questioning regarding his officiating at a wedding unregistered with the chief rabbinate—in violation of a 2013 statute enforcing the rabbinate’s monopoly on weddings and divorces. Before the police had a chance to interrogate him, Israel’s attorney general shut down the investigation and Haiyun was released. The incident provoked understandable outrage in the Israeli and American-Jewish press, which immediately presented readers with a simplistic narrative: the chief rabbinate, increasingly dominated by ultra-Orthodox rabbis with totalitarian impulses, detained (or “arrested” as some reports had it) a Conservative rabbi for performing a non-Orthodox wedding. Elli Fischer, who himself has performed a number of illegal weddings, seeks to set the record straight:
July 24, 2018
A Sliver of Good News for Israel from the Trump–Putin Summit
But can Russia uphold its promises?
No, an Israeli Rabbi Wasn’t Arrested for Performing Non-Orthodox Weddings
Setting the record straight on the Haiyun affair.
Remembering the Russian (and Jewish) Proust
Nikolai Freudenstein/Yuri Felsen.
Seventy Years On, What Scholars Have Learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls
Halakhah was important no matter how it was understood.