When Fairfax resident Yasmine Noury boarded an El Al flight late last year, she joined the growing ranks of North American Jews who immigrated to Israel in 2005.
Over a year ago, my friend Ammiel Hirsch, a prominent Reform rabbi, and I co-authored "One People, Two Worlds," a debate-in-print about the issues that divide us. In the time that has gone by since its publication, the two worlds have not drawn any closer, but at least in my case, the book has engendered a heightened sensitivity to the people on the other side.
The numbers of Humanistic Judaism are small — especially given the millions of Jews in the world who identify themselves as nonreligious — but Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine of Detroit, who founded the Society for Humanistic Judaism in 1969, remains optimistic.
The media has been busy for months with \”One People, Two Worlds\” (Schocken Books, 2002), the book I co-authored with Ammie
Hirsch, and the promotional tour from which I withdrew after two appearances in deference to the Council of Torah Sages.
Is America a great country, or what? By the time Joe Lieberman (Yale \’64, Yale Law \’67) had propelled himself upward by means of first-class education, the country had changed dramatically. Kennedy had succeeded where his Roman Catholic predecessor, Al Smith, had failed.
The JOFA conference brought together some 700 women and 300 men for a weekend of religious activism and scholarly lectures on the question of tzeniut, a mix of modesty and dignity, and other aspects of communal life, all gathered under the rubric \”Discovering/Uncovering/Recovering Women in Judaism.\”
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