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Julia Glassman blogs as The Girl Detective at Modern Mitzvot. Jay Michaelson responds below.

I’ve attended an Orthodox service exactly once in my life, and I’ll never do it again.
It was Yom Kippur during my year in France, when I was working as an au pair for a Parisian Jewish family. They’d wanted someone a [...]

Mr. Fischbach is Professor of History, Randolph-Macon College and the author of Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries (Columbia University Press (August 2008).

Michael Fischbach‘s review of his own book is disturbing. Not so much because it has bias, or lacks factual data. It is disturbing because it brings to light another situation concerning the [...]

Don’t you hate it when you accept an invitation to a wedding or bar mitzvah, and then remember that you have tickets for something that same night?
So what do you do? Try to get rid of the tickets? Try to wheedle out of your social obligation? Try to attend both?
Well, after my wife and I [...]

I have been sitting on this post since July 2, 2008. This is a huge issue as far as I am concerned, and a personal one at that. Of course, the news on the state of diaspora relations with Israel doesn’t pause, so I’ve decided that tonight would be [...]

On August 1st, I participated in a small tour through Canada Park lead by Eitan Bronstein, the Director of Zochrot [Remembering], an organization of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. Canada Park is run by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and lies thirty minutes outside of Tel [...]

With Israel postponing the Dorner commission recommendations of stipends being paid to the first group of Holocaust survivors, Haaretz pounds back, calling on survivors to “react to such an attitude by blocking the entrance to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in order to emphasize that Israel has lost its moral right to speak in their [...]

Ayala stood excited in front of more then one hundred people in a special poetry and music support event that was host and organized by the two poets and activists, Mati Shemoelof and Almog Behar.
(photo taken by Moti Kikyon. from right to left: Mati Shemoelof and Almog Behar) The event took place at the [...]

[Editorial note: As the media, particularly in the U.S., does not present these stories, it's important for us to provide information and accounts so that more people can have a deeper understanding of the human rights violations that are occurring in the West Bank and Gaza, and overall for people to have a broader lens [...]

I’ve been living in Jerusalem for a year now, and spending most of my time in a progressive Jewish community which also prays three times a day and always recites the blessing after meals. One of the central moments in each of these moments of prayer times is the prayer to build Jerusalem: “boneh yerushalayim,” [...]

Like many of you, I’m an Obama supporter. A few months ago, I started to hear about various efforts among progressive Jews to support him. (Righteous Indignation expressed prior interest in nonpartisan GOTV activities.) But so far, the dominant effort on my radar screen seems to be JewsforObama.com, for view (strangely enough) at www.jews4barack.com.
On the [...]