My colleagues and friends in the Orthodox rabbinate and beyond have been debating the limits of Orthodox Judaism, based on the recent RCA resolution to ban female rabbis, and based on Agudath Israel’s ...

On the third day of Easter, I stood in front of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Kiev, Ukraine. With me was a prominent scholar of American religion who was visiting Eastern Europe for the first time. We ...

I never did like the name “Open Orthodoxy”. It doesn’t take a Talmudic genius to see its not-so-subtle insinuation, that the rest of the Orthodox world is somehow…“closed.” Closed, though, to what? To ...

Readers of Israel’s Haaretz.com, many of them liberal and secular, must have been surprised to read, in late October, a public manifesto, signed by 42 members of the Rabbinical Council of America ...

As the sun began to rise high above the wine-dark Aegean Sea, the twelve bells of Great Lavra monastery on Mount Athos pealed out a welcome. In the rock-strewn bay at the foot of the 500-ft.

Patriarch Kirill’s (right) messianic exceptionalism — his vision of Russia as called to save the world from itself — and his complicity with the propaganda of the Russian state and actions of ...

Zionism thrived on diversity, but rising orthodoxy risks shrinking the movement and alienating Jews with differing views on religion and policy. Zionism has always been a diverse movement in members ...

This is the year's midnight. There's a hush to the dark, short days between Christmas and the New Year. Some still see it as a sacred time, a period of meditation. Others - now the great majority - ...

Perhaps no one has written as eloquently about the aspirations of a modern university than former Yale President Bart Giamatti; his address, "The Earthly Uses of a Liberal Education" (available as a ...