Pesah: A Liberating Experience for Women

Mar 4, 2013 By Judith Hauptman | Commentary | Pesah

There is no festival more home- and family-oriented than Pesah. Sukkot may run a close second, but the seder places Pesah way ahead. Although celebrating at home with a lavish family meal should make this holiday a pleasure to anticipate, for many women this is not so. The painstaking conversion of the kitchen from leaven-filled to leaven-free status has turned the Festival of Freedom into an intense period of domestic labor rather than a celebration of personal and national liberation. That was not the intention of the halakhah.

Rachel Leans In

Nov 5, 2013 By Michal Raucher | Commentary | Vayetzei

Recent conversations in popular feminism revolve around trying to capture what it means to “have it all,” and, if that’s even possible, how to achieve it.

In Search of God

Oct 29, 2013 By Julia Andelman | Commentary | Toledot

Through the unexpected and serendipitous Shabbat meal invitations that often seem to come about when one is studying in Jerusalem, I found myself many years ago sitting at the festive Shabbat table of an ultra-Orthodox family one autumn Friday night.

Love and Covenant

Nov 6, 2015 By Blu Greenberg | Commentary | Hayyei Sarah

In the mid-90s, Bill Moyers of the eponymous television show invited viewers to watch Genesis: A Living Conversation, the 10 part series he conducted with Bible scholars, writers, psychologists, lawyers, artists, and communal and religious leaders of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The invitation frontispiece read: “Rape, fratricide, jealously, temptation, fear, rage, murder . . . Welcome to Genesis.”  Moyers was capturing the powerful “flawed models” nature of biblical heroes that make them eternally accessible and the inescapable truth about the human capacity for evil: “And the heart of man is evil. . . from his youth.” (Gen. 6:5)

The Gefilte Fish On My Seder Plate

Apr 8, 2014 By Anne Lapidus Lerner | Short Video | Pesah

Men And Women: In The Kitchen And At The Seder

Apr 8, 2014 By Judith Hauptman | Short Video | Pesah

Defeating DOMA: The Changing Nature of Equality Under the US Constitution

Mar 18, 2015

Roberta Kaplan, Partner, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, who successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court the landmark U.S. V. Windsor marriage equality case, which struck down a key provision of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), explores this groundbreaking ruling. Dozens of courts have relied explicitly on this case to accord gay couples equal rights under the law.

Women of Value: Is the Bible a Patriarchal Text?

Oct 27, 2014 By Amy Kalmanofsky | Public Event video

Is the Bible a Patriarchal Text? Dr. Amy Kalmanofsky presents this topic at the opening plenary session of the Jewish Women’s University for a Day, an adult learning program hosted by JTS on Sunday, October 27, 2013 at Rice University in Houston, Texas.