So, sometimes you find yourself someplace in the world without a clue as to what, if any, Jewish community is around you and once you're there, what are you going to do, walk around the street asking? Well, you might, stranger things have happened, of course. Or, you might not even think to look around some places for other MOTs, wrongly assuming we'd be nowhere in sight. However, in all my travels, I have been pleasantly surprised, again and again, to meet and befriend our peeps all over the place.

So, sort-of-regularly, I'm going to do some of the homework for you and focus on different Jewish communities here and there we don't often hear much about. Yes? Great. And to start things off, we're heading to Omaha to catch up with the 6,500-member community.

Omaha: A nice artsy, progressive, Jewy place to visit. Who knew?

Now, I visited Omaha a little over a year ago for the first time--the (Downtown) Omaha Lit Fest is a great time, by the by-- and decided I loved the place with its art and culture, like this wonderful progressive stronghold in the middle of, well, fields.

To travel deeper next time you find yourself in Nebraska, see who you can find of the Jewish community of Omaha-- touch base with The Jewish Federation of Omaha, swing by the Omaha JCC, hit this site that the Federation offers for answers to questions like, "Can you keep kosher in Omaha?" (yes), "Are there any Jewish Day Schools in Omaha?" (yes) and get the scoop on the choices of shuls in Omaha: Temple Israel (Reform-- and they have a gift and Judaica shop), Beth El (conservative-- and they have a gift and Judaica shop, too), Beth Israel (orthodox), a Chabad center (where just last month a challah-thon took place!) and Beyt Shalom (reconstructionist). Then, there's the Kripke Jewish Library, and since you're there, pay a nice little visit to the Rose Blumkin Jewish Home for the elderly (they have a mikveh you can use there, if you call, fyi) and to the Friedel Jewish Academy to meet b'nai Omaha.

Go get your shalom bayit on, wherever your travels take you.

This morning's sessions: when the messiah's coming, and what it means to believe - fave quote: ''Why wasn't the Rambam just, like, I KNOW the messiah's coming?'' -- and a veritable feast of the Danish gay poet Jacob Israel van Haas, whose brother became a hasid and sister became a nun. Issues always sound better in dutch. Seriously: it's like Italian seduced German and had a kid who never stops french kissing.

There are SO many different lanugages here. I'm getting lost in them and I love it.

And I stand by what I said, that there's nothing like this anywhere. At least, not that I've seen. Yes, I know we have lots of Jews stateside -- I'm a yank myself, I live in Brooklyn and I'm representing NYC over here, whoo, but the feeling I get here is that of jews of nearly every different band coming together -- can't wait for NY Limmud and the amazingness that will come with it, but Tamar, you've gotta get yourself over here. England is a very different place than New York - know, though, us New Yorkers think there's nothing else out there, certainly nothing better - but the very smallness of the UK is what makes it so fascinating that all these little demographics interact in a way that I've never seen in america.....that is, actually interacting. and without those petty labels like ''conservative'' or ''reform'' or ''breslov hasid who would never ordinarily go to the shiur of a conservative rabbi, but hell, we're at Limmud and boundaries are sooo last decade.''

Hello, FaithHackers. I'm Matt.

I suppose the best way to start would be to discuss the main process that I've been going through this past year: deciding which Conservative rabbinical school to attend. I know this doesn't seem particularly relevant to 99.9% of you reading this (if not more), but bear with me.

This year, while studying in Israel at the Conservative Yeshiva (more about this in a later post), I decided that I want to be a Conservative rabbi, and underwent the process of applying to both JTS in Manhattan and UJ in Bel Air (the easy way that many people came up with for remembering which school is which is that JTS and NYC each have three letters, while UJ and LA have only two; this clever mnemonic was ruined when UJ changed its name to AJU a few months, but I digress).

As I applied to each school, I chatted with students from both JTS and UJ/AJU through the process. The exact content of these conversations is not important but it became clear that, for whatever reason, each felt that their school was superior for something that the other school did not possess. I was torn between the two, and to facilitate my decision, I had the privilege of visiting both schools in the middle of February. I was very impressed with each school and learned a lot about both institutions; but, the main thing I noticed during my visits was just how similar the two schools are. Let's face it, Conservative Judaism (especially the way it's taught in rabbinical schools) is a very specific thing, so while proponents of each school may accentuate their differences, I continue to hold that if you take a faculty member/student/janitor from each school and put them in front of me, I couldn't tell the difference, even after talking to them for a while. There are advocates of a strict halachic approach in LA, just like there are crunchy vegetarian hippies in NY: no hard and fast rules apply.
The American Jewish University's campus: For those that chose New York over California, that green stuff on the ground is called grass.
Furthermore, aspects of one program that were supposed to be particularly strong were, if anything, more impressive at the other. That's an awkward sentence, so I'll try to explain: UJ/AJU claims "practical rabbinics" is one of its strength , yet I was extremely impressed by the internship/job placement counselor at JTS. Conversely, while JTS points to its faculty as the institution's bastion of strength, every faculty member I met in Los Angeles seemed great. This is not to say the career services in LA are subpar or that JTS' faculty is poor; not surprisingly, the elements each school claims as their strengths are solid as well. But, I found it amusing that the points set up to be the deciding factors were often a wash in terms of comparing the two.

So, why the hell should you care? I could present you with the old "things are more complicated than they seem/you can't take what people say at face value without seeing for yourself", but that's a little cliche and not a particularly strong point to end my first post with. Let's go with this instead: the world, including/especially the Jewish world, is moving much too quickly these days to hold on to ideas from a few years ago without checking them against the present day to know if they're still true. We live in an information age, where exchange of ideas is both easier and more important than ever before because of the speed with which things evolve. That, in a nutshell, is why I'm excited to be a part of FaithHacker. I'll throw some ideas out there, please throw some back at me, and whether we toss together a brand new way of approaching Judaism altogether or end up with the intellectual equivalent of a food fight, it should be fun along the way.

This week marked the installation of Arnold Eisen as the new Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary.  In appointing Eisen, the Conservative movement has taken the radical step of selecting someone who has actually has signigicant knowledge of the world outside the gates of the Jewish Hogwarts.  (As a side point, I think JTS would be much cooler if it sorted its incoming classes into Houses - who wouldn't want to see a good game of Talmudic Quidditch between Heschel House and Kaplan House?)

Eisen's ascension inspired the Forward to host a forum on the perenially popular topic of the Conservative Movement's ongoing malaise, the theme of outgoing chancellor Schorsch's caustic goodbye speech.  The Forward had the foresight to include some fresher voices along with the usual suspects.

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