About Jo Ellen Green Kaiser
War is Assur
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
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
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
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
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
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
–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
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
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
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