Non-Orthodox Jews frequently seem concerned that Orthodox Jews are judging them about their lack of Jewishness. On JewishJournal.com, Jason Lipeles writes: "Although he had a long beard, I wasn’t nervous or thinking that maybe he was judging my lack of Jewishness." Why would they car...

By My life has never fit 'inside the box.' One-word answers have almost never sufficed for any aspect thereof. So it's no surprise that my religious beliefs don't lend themselves to a succinct definition. My religious affiliation can perhaps best be summed up by a remark uttered to me at the last Sh...

By A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on Jewcy about my Jewish identity - more specifically, about not knowing Hebrew and wondering if that made me less of a Jew. I also referenced the fact that my mother is not Jewish, which isn't some big secret or anything, but was tangential to the main topic of th...

I love the writing Lilit Marcus, who’s revived Jewcy.com. She comments: "I know that a large part of the reason I am so insecure about my religious identity is because of men I’ve dated and their judgments on my Jewishness. When I was dating a modern Orthodox guy, he considered me &...

I've had the urge to go on this rant for the past few weeks and I figured that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was an appropriate time to express it. The Rant I was recently reminiscing about the movie Men in Black (1997) with some friends when a middle-aged Jewish guy sitting nearby overheard us and sa...

By When I was a kid, I begged - outright begged, the way some kids beg for a pony or a trip to Disney World - my parents to let me have a bat mitzvah. A secular Jew (who had never had a bar mitzvah of his own) and a Presbyterian could not have been less interested in celebrating a religious ritual w...

From America’s “Jewish Triangleâ€� to Iraqi’s “Sunni Triangleâ€� Government Job Notice: No Gentiles Need Apply Mohamed Khodr “The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.â€� –Yuri Slezkine, Professor of History at University of Ca...

Haaretz’s Daphna Berman writes today in ‘Elitist’ Leadership Alienating U.S. Jews, Says Prominent Sociologist, about a fascinating new study by sociologist Chaim Waxman about the nature of youth affiliation (download as pdf) with the American Jewish community. Two elements of the r...

According to Hegel, attaining 'self-consciousness' is a process that necessarily involves the other. How am I to become conscious of myself in general? It is simply through desire or anger, for example. Unlike animals that overcome biological needs by destroying another organic entity, human desire ...

Menahem Wecker reviews a new book called Jews & Sex: Abrams opens his own study of the ways people have responded to Jewish involvement in pornography by critiquing Luke Ford, “a self-styled adult industry gossip-monger.” Abrams argues that Ford, who has since given up his porn sites...