Katy Perry’s Birthday video is a classic example of “acceptable” racism. I’ve got a piece running in the Huffington Post on the surprisingly one-dimensional anti-Jewish caricature in the video of the pop superstar which can also be read below:
What exactly is the egg doing on the seder plate? Why do we serve eggs on Passover? The roasted orb has been a guest of honor for generations and hardly a word has been spoken in its direction. The matzah, the shank bone, the bitter herbs — they generate the buzz year after year. But what would you say about the egg? After polling some of my friends, I came up with a list of things we’ve heard about the…
I’ve got a new essay running up on the Huffington Post. You can find it here if you’d like to read it and all the bizarre commentaries that follow it. Or for the text, see below… “If I started talking about science from the pulpit,” a seasoned Methodist minister sitting to my left said, “my wife would shoot a spitball from the choir!” As Anthony Thomas’ new documentary about the rise of creationism entitled Questioning Darwin is about to air…
One Man’s Quest to Teach Science to Clergy By Daniel S. Brenner “If I started talking about science from the pulpit” a seasoned Methodist minister sitting to my left said, “my wife would shoot a spitball from the choir!” At a time when folks are dressing creationism in a lab coat and attempting to sneak it into public school classrooms I’m sitting with a group of established and emerging religious leaders in a class at Auburn Theological Seminary in New…
By Rabbi Daniel Brenner A couple of years ago, I was sitting in a shivah minyan at the home of a friend who had just lost his father. My friend, a typical southern born Jew, had gone to a nominally Christian private school during the day and received a minimal Jewish education at his Reform Temple one afternoon a week. So when it came time for him to read the kaddish, he could recite the prayer pretty well, but had…
By Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner At a conference on a ridiculously sunny spring day at NYU I met a Jewish guy in his thirties planning on getting hitched this summer. When he heard that I was the director of a project focused on the lives of boys and men in the Jewish community, he expressed his frustration that he could not find anything out there on men and pre-nuptial mikvah. I remember having the same experience – Eighteen years ago,…
What Does “Today I Am a Man” Mean Today? Published on RitualWell www.ritualwell.org By Rabbi Daniel Brenner In the 1990s, when my beloved was dissertating about race in American theater, I was introduced to a theory on Jewish masculinity from the late Berkeley professor Michael Rogin. His argument, in sum, was that the large Eastern European immigrant generation of Jewish men looked to two different models of men to determine how to “be a man” in America. The first model…
Should Catholic hospitals that receive federal dollars be required to provide their employees with contraceptives? This was the heated debate on talk radio as I drove up the New Jersey Turnpike recently. I tuned in because I was one of the many people who had seen the photo of the all-male congressional panel on contraception making its way around Facebook. One of these men, Rabbi Meir Soloveichek, had contributed two prominent pieces for the Wall Street Journal and Jewish Ideas Daily. But after…
http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/187909/the-muslim-film-every-bat-mitzvah-girl-should-see/
I have a new piece published in the Huffington Post today about the recent arrest of Anat Hoffman at the Western Wall. The piece can be accessed here. Who Has the Right to Pray at the Western Wall? Posted: 10/23/2012 5:50 pm After I posted an article on Facebook about Anat Hoffman, the Israeli woman arrested last week for praying in a tallit at the Western Wall, a friend and colleague, who happens to be an Orthodox rabbi, messaged me on Google chat…