Gershom Gorenberg My latest piece on the conversion crisis is on-line, a bit late, at the Hadassah Magazine site. Crisis is too nice a word. What’s really happening is that part of the Israeli state rabbinate has adopted a radical ultra-Orthodox innovation: regarding conversion to Judaism as something that can be annulled. Yes, folks, I [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg A few days ago, Haim, you responded to a challenge I raised in a post on the conversion battles. Your answer made me realize that I hadn’t phrased the question sharply enough. I wrote: “We need to define a civic Israeli identity not dependent on halakhic status.” You wrote that I was right, [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg If there’s one subject that forces U.S. Jewish leaders to express their views on Israeli politics, it’s “Who’s a Jew.” In previous years, the crises began when it looked like the Knesset would change the Law of Return so that non-Orthodox converts would not qualify to immigrate as Jews. That threatened the legitimacy [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The divide between the ultra-Orthodox and other Jews over who is Jewish continues to widen. In the latest developments, ultra-Orthodox rabbis in both Israel and the U.S. have asserted that conversion is reversible — that a convert can cease to be Jewish if she or he does not live according to halakhah, Jewish [...]

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“Obama Converts to Judaism” says a headline on Huffington Post, which I found via the eternally alert Laura Rozen at War and Piece. Buffeted by criticism of his controversial Christian pastor while continuing to quell rumors that he is a Muslim, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill) took a bold step today to settle questions about his [...]

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