War Has Changed, but Territory Still Matters
A painful loss for Israel’s enemies.
March 8, 2024
When Conservative Rabbis Argued about Ordaining Women
A dispute between the old world and the new?
A decade ago, an intense debate came to a head within American Modern Orthodoxy over the ordination of female rabbis. Forty years earlier, the same controversy played out within Conservative Judaism, with very different results. The decision to ordain women was championed by Gerson Cohen, an eminent historian of medieval Jewry and then the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary—the movement’s flagship institution. Zvi Leshem examines an unfinished draft of a letter about the controversy composed by Cohen’s main opponent at the time, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni (1927–2022), a highly original talmudist raised in the same Romanian shtetl as Elie Wiesel.
March 8, 2024
Meet the New Anti-Zionism, Same as the Old Anti-Zionism
What attracted Harvard students to a 1960s anti-Semitic cartoon?
Don’t Ignore the Religious Roots of Hamas’s Brutality
The atrocities weren’t a byproduct of war but an end in themselves.
A Piece of 11th-Century Technology Displays Muslim-Jewish Scientific Collaboration
The astrolabe of Verona.
When Conservative Rabbis Argued about Ordaining Women
A dispute between the old world and the new?