Earlier this week the High Court of Justice ended the Chief Rabbinate’s kashrut monopoly. Thus one era in kashrut services ends and a new one begins – in which the kashrut industry will operate freely, without supervision. The court’s decision was about kashrut, but its significance is much broader. The court’s ruling weakens the Chief Rabbinate, and brings the State of Israel…

Annual Assessment 2017 5777 PROJECT HEAD Dr. Shlomo Fischer CONTRIBUTORS Avinoam Bar-Yosef, Chaya Ekstein, Dan Feferman, Matthew Gerson Avi Gil, Inbal Hakman, Yossi Chen, Michael Herzog, Dov Maimon, Gitit Paz-Levi, Steven Popper, Uzi Rebhun, Shmuel Rosner, John Ruskay, Noah Slepkov, Shalom Salomon Wald EDITORS Barry Geltman Rami Tal Download the PDF Version:

Relations between the Jewish religion and the State of Israel began to take form even before the state was founded. Since then, and over the past 70 years, it has been customary to speak about a “status quo” on matters of religion and state. Politicians, the courts, the media and the wider public regularly refer to this status quo. But…

In this document, the future prime minister promised that in the future Jewish state, Shabbat would be the statutory day off for Jews; that all official kitchens would observe kashrut; that marriage and divorce would be conducted according to religious law; and that the educational institutions of the various religious streams would be allowed autonomy beyond the definition of a…

One of the talmudic sages, R. Hananiah the Temple prefect, made the same point: “Pray for the welfare of the government. For if it were not for fear of it, one man would swallow his fellow alive (Avot 3:3).” But the powers we voluntarily surrender to the leviathan are incomparably vast and dangerous. The government employs institutionalized violence internally (the…

Rabin was right; red lines are not for prime ministers to draw. They need to hold their cards close to the chest. Real red lines belong to the people. The following is an op-ed originally published by the Jerusalem Post.In the spring of 1995, as the Washington bureau chief of Ma’ariv, I wrote a couple of analyses explaining why then…

  INDIA, ISRAEL AND THE JEWISH PEOPLE Looking Ahead, Looking Back 25 Years after Normalization   With a Foreword by H.E. President Reuven Rivlin   Shalom Salomon Wald and Arielle Kandel

     Family, Engagement, and Jewish Continuity among American Jews   Sylvia Barack Fishman and Steven M. Cohen   Learning Jewishness, Jewish Education, and Jewish Identity   Sylvia Barack Fishman and Shlomo Fischer Contributors: Rachel S. Bernstein, Dov Maimon and Shmuel Rosner  

On Shavuot night, hundreds of thousands of people will leave their homes and celebrate a “white night.” For a few hours, they will detach themselves from the powerful forces that move all Israelis — money, politics, celebrities, disputes, and sports. Large numbers of women and men will assemble to study Jewish texts and ideas. This amazing event — the Tikkun…