Gary Rosenblatt
What Passover tells us about peoplehood
5 months ago | 0 0 comments | 6 6 recommendations | email to a friend
NEW YORK — For the longest time, Jewish peoplehood was lived rather than discussed. But no longer. Ever since the Israelites fled Egypt and crossed the Red Sea in miraculous fashion — a seminal ac...
Averting Disaster in U.S.-Israeli struggle
5 months ago | 0 0 comments | 5 5 recommendations | email to a friend
NEW YORK — Remember “The Poseidon Adventure,” the melodramatic 1972 film about a group of desperate passengers aboard an aging, ill-fated luxury liner about to sink? The long-forgotten plot of the...
Money is vital, but the power of ideas sustains us
6 months ago | 0 0 comments | 12 12 recommendations | email to a friend
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...
On being Michael Steinhardt
6 months ago | 0 0 comments | 11 11 recommendations | email to a friend
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...
Still redundant after all these years?
7 months ago | 0 0 comments | 7 7 recommendations | email to a friend
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 ...
Compromise has its limits: Gilad Shalit and Iran
7 months ago | 0 0 comments | 14 14 recommendations | email to a friend
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...
The ’00s: Variations on a theme of trauma
8 months ago | 0 0 comments | 9 9 recommendations | email to a friend
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...
New effort to bolster Israel’s crisis response
10 months ago | 0 0 comments | 9 9 recommendations | email to a friend
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 ...
The other half of tikkun olam
12 months ago | 0 0 comments | 19 19 recommendations | email to a friend
(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 challenge of Muslim immigration
12 months ago | 0 0 comments | 12 12 recommendations | email to a friend
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...
Do unto others: Scandals and sanctity
13 months ago | 0 0 comments | 11 11 recommendations | email to a friend
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...
Mourning, noon and night
by Gary Rosenblatt
13 months ago | 0 0 comments | 27 27 recommendations | email to a friend
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...
Whispered worries about Obama
14 months ago | 0 0 comments | 15 15 recommendations | email to a friend
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...
Creating a Jewish GDP
14 months ago | 0 0 comments | 26 26 recommendations | email to a friend
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 ...
Taking anti-Semitism for granted
15 months ago | 0 0 comments | 16 16 recommendations | email to a friend
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...