Can a Jew legally cancel his Jewishness? (Yehuda Kurtzer, The Jerusalem Post, May 26,2011)
Yossi Klein Halevi in US media
Beyond Religious and Secular (Jerusalem Post)
A recent essay by Ariel Picard, Educational Director of Shalom Hartman Institute’s Be’eri program, was quoted in a Jerusalem Post article entitled, " Beyond Religious and Secular ":
"There have been, Picard writes, two broad streams of thinking about Jewish law, each best exemplified by a great medieval thinker. For Yehuda Halevi (c. 1075-1141), the truths of prophecy and revelation issue directly from God and are vouchsafed by the chain of tradition. For Maimonides (1138-1204), these truths are mediated by the exertions of human reason. The respective outlooks of these two thinkers – roughly, tradition and obedience vs. interpretation and intellectual cultivation – have vied with one another throughout the course of Jewish religious history.
"Turning to the present, Picard avers that the first model commands the allegiance only of the already faithful, and then only by keeping its engagement with modernity to a minimum. The second, however, offers the possibility of combining fidelity to tradition with outward engagement. That is, even if halacha cannot (and should not) function as the law of a liberal democratic state, it can and must serve as a normative voice within civil society, and in that society’s debates over the shape and meaning of community and identity.
"Central to Picard’s project is Sabbath observance – not as something to be coerced – to the contrary, undoing religious coercion is of vital importance to him – but as a means of educating all of us in how to retain our humanity and its trace of the divine in a market- and media driven world. Indeed, it is the living reality of Jewish statehood that for Picard makes possible just this sort of head-on engagement of halacha with the larger society and culture."
Donniel Hartman’s column on Pesach, " The Memory of Pesach: A Tale of Two Stories ," was reprinted by Ynetnews .
Shalom from Egypt (Global Conversation, March 2, 2011)
After making waves in Egypt and then Israel , Donniel Hartman’s " Letter to the Egyptian People " continues to be noticed. Amanda Labora of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies quoted from the article in a March 2, 2011, blog post. Rob Eshman, editor of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, also noted it in two separate pieces he posted on the newspaper’s website.
Donniel Hartman was also asked by Jerusalem Report to pen an article about the phenomenon created by the original article. The piece for the Jerusalem Report, "The Neighbor’s Mirror," is not available online as of mid-March, 2011.
Hello, Rabbi
(Yedioth Ahronoth, Feb. 22, 2011)
Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s leading daily newspapers, features a column from the SHI website by Donniel Hartman and the many responses received to the column on our website from Egyptians and the larger Arab world in a lengthy article. Click here to read the article in English.
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