What we can learn from the RCA and the URJ

by Amram Altzman for newvoices.com    

On Oct. 30, mainstream Orthodox leaders in the Rabbinical Council of America confirmed once again that women who receive the same training and jobs as men still are not — and never will be — equal to men. Six days later, the Union for Reform Judaism passed a landmark resolution on the inclusion of transgender individuals in the Reform movement. It would be too much to pass up the irony of these two events happening in the same week.

As much as I want to focus solely on the progress marked by the URJ resolution and the fact that a Jewish religious organization can vote resoundingly — without one “no” to be heard — and affirmatively when asked if they should take more active steps to include transgender individuals in their communities, I’m tempered by the statements of the RCA.

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Finding Judaism in my passion for environmental activism

By Jonah Watt for The Bowdoin Orient

Every Sunday morning for 10 years, I sat in my Hebrew school classroom, passing around a small tin tzedakah box and emptying my pockets full of loose change into it. At the end of the year, we dumped out the contents and counted the money inside. In an exercise of early childhood democracy, we would vote as a class where to donate the tzedakah, and then our teacher would send a check to the animal shelter or local food pantry of our choosing.

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How College Can Put the Jewish in Children of Intermarriage

Leonard Saxe Fern Chertok and Theodore Sasson for The Jewish Daily Forward   

The late great baseball player and philosopher Yogi Berra once quipped, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Our new study, “Millennial Children of Intermarriage: Touchpoints and Trajectories of Jewish Engagement,” attests to Berra’s wisdom. Despite decades of worry that American “children of intermarriage” would be lost to the community, a large-scale study of young adult applicants to Birthright Israel found that the story is more complicated, and more hopeful.

Not surprisingly, young adults raised by intermarried parents grow up with a more limited set of Jewish educational and social experiences. However, if these children of intermarriage become involved in Jewish experiences in college — through Birthright Israel, Jewish campus groups or courses — their Jewish identity and later engagement look in many respects very much like that of children of two Jewish parents.

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On Urban Outfitters and Jewish masculinities

by Amram Altzman for newvoices.com

I like Jewish boys. A lot.

Which is why I was elated when Urban Outfitters released its 2016 Nice Jewish Guys calendar — and then I realized how conflicted I was. While I support the proliferation of the Nice Jewish Boy — and God only knows the world needs more of them — I also have many qualms with Urban Outfitters and some of their business ethics and clothing choices.

Part of why I’m so conflicted about the calendar is that I’m tired of seeing Jewish people presented as exotic and as just another classless calendar or article of clothing that Urban Outfitters sells for the sake of its own outrageousness — though much tamer, is the calendar really that different from the Kent State sweatshirt with fake blood stains, or any of their other merchandise which are questionable at best and utterly tasteless at worst? The Nice Jewish Guys calendar, just like everything Urban Outfitters seems to sell, is meant to draw attention through its absurdity and tokenizing of certain groups. The chain isn’t exactly known for appealing to sensible presentations of people and things (how could you ever call mittens with one panda bear mounting another, or socks with strippers on them, “sensible”?).

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Who Will Be the Next President of Yeshiva University?

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine   

Last month, Richard Joel announced that he would be stepping down as president of Yeshiva University. The departure will open a void at the heart of both an institution and a denomination—Modern Orthodoxy—that stand at a crossroads.

On the one hand, Y.U. is the flagship of Modern Orthodoxy. It is an institution that fuses high-level religious learning with secular instruction and consistently ranks in the top 50 universities named by U.S. News and World Report. On the other hand, the school has been beset by financial difficulties and management failures, and has come under increasing attack from a right that views it as too modern and a left that sees it as too conservative. A new president would need to restore donor confidence in the institution and infuse it with an ideological message that resonates more broadly in the Orthodox and wider Jewish world.

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