One government is overturned in France, another in Greece, and in Britain the coalition loses votes. These are just the latest casualties of the political turmoil that has hit, among others, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Finland and Ireland in the past year. A perfect storm is in the making: financial...
(28) Comments | Posted April 17, 2012 | 2:14 PM
This Wednesday evening and Thursday (April 18-19), Jews around the world will be commemorating Yom HaShoah, the day set aside in the Jewish calendar for Holocaust remembrance.
During the nightmare years of the Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust) one moment stands out for what it...
(24) Comments | Posted April 14, 2012 | 7:14 AM
Celebrating Passover, as we've just been doing, I've been reminded of a very odd feature of the biblical story.
Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, "What happened?" but rather, "How then...
(2) Comments | Posted April 2, 2012 | 1:43 PM
What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later. "Bliss was it...
(13) Comments | Posted December 12, 2011 | 4:13 PM
As the political leaders of Europe meet to save the Euro and European Union, so should religious leaders. That is why I have come to Rome, to discuss our shared concerns at the Gregorian University and with His Holiness the Pope.
The idea sounds absurd. What has religion to do...
(7) Comments | Posted October 6, 2011 | 9:00 AM
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the holy of holies of Jewish time. It is that rarest of phenomena, a Jewish festival without food. Instead it is a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgment when, collectively and repeatedly, we confess our sins and pray to be written...
(5) Comments | Posted July 5, 2011 | 11:53 AM
It was the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, the man who ten years ago delivered the bad news, who has now given us the good news. Social capital, once thought lost, has been found again, at least in the U.S. Putnam became famous for the phrase he used to describe the...
(163) Comments | Posted April 17, 2011 | 9:10 PM
As one nation after another in Africa and the Middle East engages in a fight for freedom, Passover, which begins this week, still has much to teach us about the nature of that fight.
The Jewish festival of freedom is the oldest continuously observed religious ritual in the world....
(14) Comments | Posted May 26, 2012 | 9:04 AM