About Jo Ellen Green Kaiser

Jo Ellen Green Kaiser is the Editor-in-chief of Zeek magazine, available at www.jewcy.com/zeek and also at www.zeek.net .She is the co-editor of Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice (www.righteousindignation.info) and the mom of Zoe.

War is Assur

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser August 28, 2008

Commonly, the laws of war in Judaism are understood through the categories of milchemet mitzvah (commanded or holy war) and milchemet r’shut (optional war). These two categories-supplemented at times by the category of milchemet hovah (obligatory war), are helpful in … Read More

Sammy Harkham: Genius

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser August 19, 2008

It was after thirty years of thinking of myself a semi-scholarly critic of Jewish American comic art, and fifty-plus years since I discovered Mad Comics to be the soul of my childish literary pleasures, that I came across the work … Read More

Light from the Postville Darkness

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser August 5, 2008

Most of the time, as a society we walk in darkness, wounded by walking blindly into an economic barbed-wire fence here, an environmental open manhole there. Once a generation–if we are lucky, once a decade–there is a flash of lightning … Read More

Talking Torah with Rabbi Rebecca Alpert

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser July 21, 2008

Zeek's Editor-in-chief, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, talks with Rabbi Rebecca Alpert about social justice, feminism and her book, Whose Torah? Zeek: When people hear your name, Rabbi Rebecca Alpert, they tend to think, "Jewish feminist lesbian." Has that label been … Read More

The Four Horsemen of the New Atheism

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser July 2, 2008

I'm tired. Most of my reading time in the last few weeks has been devoted to the "Four Horseman of Atheism"-Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. And now that I've emerged from my self-imposed sequestration-blinking in … Read More

The Jewish American Princess–Revisited

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser June 6, 2008

What ever happened to the Jewish American Princess? Once—from the 1960s until at least the end of the 1980s—the icon of the JAP was all but ubiquitous in American Jewish culture. The girl (yes, she was always a girl, even … Read More

POEM: “Rita” by Roman Baembaev

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser May 22, 2008

–These buffoons have lost their minds. Did you see the bill that we got? I asked Rita. –Let's make a baby, Rita said, not listening to a single word. I went up to the window and looked outside. An old … Read More

Jewish Architecture: An Interview with Daniel Libeskind

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser May 15, 2008

Wowed by the example of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim, museums around the world have raced to commission brilliant, experimental architects to build structures at least as noteworthy as their collections. Architect Daniel Libeskind has become the star of the Jewish … Read More

Are Overbearing Men a Feminist Issue? Check Your Pants for the Answer

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser April 23, 2008

Do you need a penis in your pants to speak your mind? That’s the rhetorical question Amy Alkon, self-proclaimed advice goddess, puts to activist guru Rebecca Solnit in response to Solnit’s Los Angeles Times op-ed suggesting that men—at least some … Read More

Clinton and Obama’s Apperances At This Weekend’s “Compassion Forum” Show Why Politics Needs Religion

By Jo Ellen Green Kaiser April 14, 2008

Sunday night, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed up at Messiah College’s Compassion Forum to talk about faith in political life. Good for them. Just wish it had been Hebrew College. As a persecuted, outnumbered, and very intelligent people of … Read More