“At the core of the problem with synagogues is how the life of the synagogue is oriented”
I have witnessed firsthand the benefits and challenges that synagogues face today. I have...
Author Archives: Drew Kaplan
“Debates about Israel seem to be the precise place where “existential anxiety” stopped referring to philosophical angst and started referring to the fear your nation could be destroyed”
Our current use of “existential” is about as far removed from artsy-philosophical realms as...
“‘Classified’ still conjures images of top-secret government plots, but, in Trump’s Washington, it’s more often used to describe information that the president would prefer to keep quiet”
Trump has been merciless toward anyone else in government who reveals his administration’s secrets,...
“Rabbi Zera merely describes a stringent practice which Babylonian Jewish women had taken upon themselves”
This term, first used by medieval commentators (see Zimmerman, p. 27, note 6), is,...
“Pettiness often manifests itself as an outsize form of revenge — responding to mild slights by putting an absurd amount of energy into plotting meaningless reprisals”
Pettiness often manifests itself as an outsize form of revenge — responding to mild...
“Anxieties about the internet began to feel more rote and less plausible, in no small part because the internet had disappeared as a distinct place”
In the coming years, as most of America got online, some variation on the...
“…we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear”
Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a...
“If there’s any historical development over the past few years that has reinforced the new allergy to devil’s advocacy, it’s the ascent of actual fascists…”
If there’s any historical development over the past few years that has reinforced the...
“The last thing a woman wants to be worrying about while in the heat of the moment is whether her arousal is an expression of her own eroticism or a symptom of patriarchal oppression”
The last thing a woman wants to be worrying about while in the heat...
“The phenomenon of a minority people arising out of the ashes of Auschwitz to reframe not only their world but to also profoundly impact the broader culture may best summarize this century of Jewish influence”
…out of the trauma and tragedy of the earlier decades of the 20th century,...