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Sigi Ziering Sh'ma Ethics

Taube New Visions

The Balcony by Ruth Calderon

Torah Commentaries:
Erica Brown
Nechama Leibowitz
Mekor Chaim

Past Issues

Upcoming: Capturing holiness on the page and canvas Creating holy communities Teaching and learning as holy work Cultivating holiness within and outside of a spiritual practice Musings on hearing the shofar Kedushah and Separation Shawn Landres Gershom Gorenberg Sponsorship opportunities available

End World Child Hunger!
Tell your friends about Project Manna, a new multi-faith cyberactivism campaign that takes only a minute.

A Changing Landscape

Affinities and Israel: A Roundtable
Israel has been for so many years as essential to our Jewish lives as the air we breathe, a preoccupation so keen, so inspiring, often so exasperating — even for those living outside its borders.  Judging on the basis of this roundtable, there is reason to believe that the next generation of Jews — including those actively engaged in Jewish life— tend to shunt Israel aside as a formative, crucial factor. Young Orthodox Jews, on the whole, continue to embrace Israel fervently, and with little equivocation. But they stand out as the exceptions. Whatever this mean, it seems clear that the following discussion is intriguing, and well worth pondering.
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J. Shawn Landres: Jewish Emergent is an appropriate subject for discussion in an issue devoted to center and periphery, not least because the phenomenon is seen by many as originating on the fringes of organized Jewish religious life, but also, more broadly, because it comprises profound expressions of dissent and disaffection about conventional Jewish religious life.
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Deborah Skolnick Einhorn: Who and what will create the permanent bridge dedicated to gender-focused traffic, from periphery to center?  This bridge must support the transport of women’s organizations into the center, as well as the movement of a fully-integrated gender sensibility into currently central organizations.
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Quote of the Month

“Increasingly American Jews are ignoring struggles over who controls the center of Jewish life. Relegated to the periphery of Jewish life because of their spouses, their associates, their minimal religious practices, their sexual orientation, their marital status, their lack of wealth, or their politics, they have discovered that things are pretty exciting out there.”

Deborah Dash Moore”


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Sh'ma serves as a gathering place for independent dialogue -- rich conversation of differing positions presented in an honest, respectful, and sacred conversation. Our readers, like our authors, are intellectually sharp, seeking, concerned and literate. Sh'ma is a publication of Jewish Family & Life! JFLMedia.com