More in ‘Conservative’

The Jewish Theological Seminary, which is the academic and spiritual center of Conservative Judaism in America, announced that it has received significant new funding toward the implementation of six new principles:
• Scholarship in Service to Judaism and the Jewish Community
• Excellence in Teaching and Learning
• Synergy
• Partnerships
• Reaching New Types of Students
• Engaging and Strengthening Conservative Judaism and the Religious Center
Which ...

Couldn’t make it up. As a 13-year-old girl, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan demanded and received the first bat mitzvah at her Upper West Side modern Orthodox synagogue.
The notion of gender equality had been making great strides in most denominations by the time the early ‘70s rolled around, the New York Times notes. Though modern ...

An Israeli sociologist has published a study based on surveys he conducted with more than 700 kids at Jewish summer camps across the United States. Campers were presented with a list of 132 symbols—a range incluiding a talis, the Talmud, a Star of David, the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen—and asked how much each one ...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist William Safire, who died Sunday at 79, was a New York City-born college dropout-turned-public relations wizard who rose to prominence in 1959 when he organized the famous “kitchen debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Krushchev in Moscow. Nixon later hired Safire to work on his failed 1960 presidential ...

For a very long time, discussions of the future of American Judaism have taken place in an atmosphere of pessimism and recrimination. Since the 1960s, the familiar story goes, Jewish religious institutions have allowed the majority of Jews to slip away. Synagogues are spiritually uninspiring places, which most Jews visit only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The Reform and Conservative movements are in an identity crisis, unable to come up with convincing theological rationales for their existence. Israel and the Holocaust have become the real pillars of American Jewish identity, and they are growing less potent all the time.