Gary Rosenblatt
NEW YORK — Not surprisingly, as the economic downturn drags on, there is much communal discussion about the need for more and more funding to keep our most precious institutions and programs intact...
NEW YORK — A self-professed atheist, Michael Steinhardt might be offended — or else amused — to be described as a modern-day prophet. It’s not that the businessman-turned-philanthropist preaches r...
NEW YORK — A report has been commissioned by the national policy-making body on Jewish community relations to study the relationship between and among the top national defense agencies — including ...
Is there is a common thread to — and lesson to be learned from — Israel’s agonizing efforts to obtain the release of Gilad Shalit, its ongoing crisis in dealing with the Palestinians, and President...
NEW YORK — Remember Y2K? Ten years ago this week, on the eve of a new year, a new decade and a new millennium, there were daily headlines everywhere predicting various forces of doom on the horizon...
A sobering statistic: Israel has averaged a war every eight years since statehood. With that in mind, and with the memory of frightened civilians in the north left on their own while under rocket ...
(Editor’s note: This column first appeared April 28, 2000.) Did you hear the one about the fellow on his first UJA mission to Israel who asked his guide, “How do you say tikkun olam in Hebrew?” T...
The only thing surprising about the decision last week of a distinguished Ivy League university press to, in effect, censor a key element of a book about censorship is how predictable the result wa...
It didn’t take long for the jokes to start making the rounds in response to the latest rabbis-as-(alleged)-crooks scandal. There was the one about the latest Friday-night practical halacha shiur, o...
The contrast between the American spectacle of celebrity death worship and the Jewish tradition of mourning has rarely been as sharply defined as recently. I write these words shortly after Michae...
Accustomed as he is to public speaking here and around the country, David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, can read an audience as well as anyone. Lately, he says, h...
NEW YORK — Think of the American Jewish community as a business — a more than $10 billion annual business. If our organizations and leaders made programming decisions based on that notion, perhaps ...
Have we reached the point where we not only take anti-Semitism for granted but don’t even question the illogical attitudes of those who hate us? I learned with shock, as we all did, of the attempt...
Prague — On a recent visit here, my wife and I toured several famous synagogues, remarkable for their long history, beautiful architecture and vast size, part of the reason why for tourists, the Je...
It’s time to recognize that, with the collapse of the economy, the American Jewish day school model is breaking, if not already broken. We have to deal with a new reality, and that calls for revis...
NEW YORK — I’ve had a growing sense of foreboding in recent days about the very real dangers to the State of Israel, internally and externally, and what I perceive to be an increasing emotional dis...
NEW YORK — More than 50 of us recently gathered for a full day to talk about whatever we wanted. But there was really only one issue on our minds. Over the past three years, when alumni of The Con...
NEW YORK — I’ve just finished reading a book called “New York Jews and the Great Depression.” Sounds all too current, I know, but it’s a study of the Jewish community here in the 1930s — how it suf...

