Jewish people

JBC News of Interest – 03/13/11

Several recent news stories may be of interest to our readers, so let’s dive right in… Apparently putting on tefillin in the airport or on an airplane can still cause you some trouble in the USA.  Once again there has been an incident in which observant Jews in morning prayers have caused panic in flight, this time on an Alaska Airlines flight to LA from Mexico.  Shmarya over at Failed Messiah has a story with links to similar ones from recent history. Arnold Eisen, the Chancellor of … [Read more…]

It’s a People Thing…

Hi All, First of all, it’s good to be writing again after a bit of an absence… my wife recently started nursing school and a crazy work schedule of my own has meant I’ve not been able to do a whole lot of contributing, certainly not as much as I would have liked.  Anyway, I have been happy to see the conversations going on the forum, and I hope to have more blog content up more regularly now. In my absence from writing I have been thinking a ton about something I wrote about in an … [Read more…]

One Great Big Family

One thing which becomes obviously to anyone who studies Judaism for more than about five minutes is that we are a people seemingly rife with disagreements, arguments, and often outright bigotry aimed at one another.  Secular Jews often lambaste haredim as fanatics, and the haredim often dismiss out of hand non-Orthodox Jews as heretics.  The pages of Jewish newspapers and internet sites play host to the many issues that divide us as a people, and this tendency is often jokingly explained away … [Read more…]