By Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal SAN DIEGO — Our celebration of Chanukah this week made the news reports coming out of Israel even more disturbing and ironic. Chanukah is the festival which celebrates Jews fighting for their rights against the Greeks. In Israel, Jews are fighting for their rights against other Jews. An eight-year-old Israeli girl […]

 By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM– “Ultra-Orthodox (or haredi) Judaism – it can never be stressed too often – is not Judaism as it was practiced in centuries past. Traditional Judaism was fluid, diverse and accommodated itself to the practical requirements of the day. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, by contrast, is a modern creation, born out of terror and

By Rabbi Ben Kamin JERUSALEM–The so-called prime minister of Hamas—a terror syndicate banned from recognition by the United States and the European Union—is campaigning in European capitals against Israel’s practice of making Jerusalem too Jewish.   Here is the verbal equivalent of Hamas’s launching of 10,000 killer missiles into Israeli towns and villages in the past

By Rabbi Dow Marmur JERUSALEM–One simple yet helpful way of describing the public discourse in and about contemporary Israel is to view it as a struggle between security (sometimes coupled with the quest for survival) and values (often equated with morality and prophetic justice).  I heard Steven Cohen, the American-Israeli sociologist, suggest in a talk