Is Caroline Kennedy's Husband Edwin Schlossberg Jewish?

Yes, Edwin Arthur Schlossberg is a Jew.

All four of Schlossberg's grandparents were Russian (Ukranian) Jews born near Poltava and arrived in the United States at Ellis Island.

In 1986 Schlossberg married Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at Hyannis Port when Caroline was 28 and Ed was 41.

Their afternoon wedding ceremony was held at the Church of Our Lady of Victory in Centerville, Massachusetts and did not include a mass.

How Jewish is Schlossberg? Nate Bloom refers to "American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy" by C. David Heymann as follows:

Heymann writes that Schlossberg was raised in a "devout Orthodox Jewish family" that belonged to a modern Orthodox synagoue in Manhattan. He attended Hebrew School and had a bar mitzvah ceremony.

Bloom adds some of the speculation regarding Schlossberg's current religious practice:

The harshest comment about Edwin Schlossberg and religion came from film producer Susan Pollock. She is a relative of Edwin's and has dined now and again with Edwin and Caroline. Pollack told Heymann that she believed Ed actually converted to Catholicism to marry Caroline and "I know he [Ed] takes Holy Communion which means he would have to convert?..."

UPDATE: See the comment below signed by "Edwin Schlossberg" denying the Bloom account. ["I have never had a conversation with Susan Pollack. I have not converted to Catholicism and have not taken Holy Communion.I am proud to be Jewish and am disappointed that this misinformation has been presented on this site and hope that you will remove it immediately." Edwin Schlossberg -- Posted by ES to Tzvee's Talmudic Blog at 3/10/2009 1:59 PM].

Tikun Olam blogger under attack -- תקון עולם

Tikun Olam-תקון עולם blogger, Richard Silverstein, is under attack for disclosing classified Israeli information.

Tikun Olam Suffers DOS Attack After Exposing Former IDF Torturer - The gremlins were very unhappy with Yossi Gurvitz and me yesterday for exposing the identity of Doron Zahavi as the military intelligence agent...

We do not know all the details but we do know that (1) we are not related to the intelligence agent and (2) we find it objectionable that Silverstein is under attack.

The blog is unreachable at 10:30 PM, 7/29/2010.

More Nutty Dead Sea Scroll News: Robert Cargill v. Lawrence Schiffman

Fox News + the Dead Sea Scrolls = nutty story.

The notions that there is a Dead Sea Scrolls biblical mystery, and that now it is solved, boggles our imagination.

And a story built around this vacuous assertion is just inane: "'Jews wrote the Scrolls, but it may not have been just one specific group. It could have been groups of different Jews,' said Robert Cargill, an archaeologist who appears in the documentary Writing the Dead Sea Scrolls..."

Huh? There is no theory here. Yet what next? "I have a feeling it's going to be very disputed," said Lawrence Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University.

Indeed not just disputed. Very disputed.

Read if you dare, here, from National Geographic via Fox, with sections headed thus:

• Dead Sea Scrolls Written by Ritual Bathers?
• Dead Sea Scrolls: "Great Treasure From the Temple"?
• Dead Sea Scrolls From Far and Wide?
• Caves Were for Temporary Scroll Storage?

Cool iPhone iPad App - Museum of Natural History

Gizmodo praises a cool new iPhone/ iPad app. It guides you around the museum, even helps you find a rest room.

...the American Museum of Natural History Explorer, an app for iPhones and iPod Touches which uses over 300 Wi-Fi hotspots to triangulate your position inside the museum—a feat of "indoor GPS" the museum claims is the first of its kind, and, if it's not, it's the most usable implementation of it I've come across—takes the stress out of finding the particular piece of history you're looking for. ..

Hat tip to Barak.

Newly Published: How the Halakhah Unfolds in the Talmud - Tzvee Zahavy's Two New Books

Highly recommended for all Jewish homes, synagogues and libraries, and an excellent gift idea.

University Press of America, Inc. publishing across academic disciplines since 1975 announces the publication of two new volumes.

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Tzvee Zahavy and Jacob Neusner

How the Halakhah Unfolds: Volume Five: Hullin in the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Bavli, Part One: Mishnah, Tosefta, and Bavli (466 pages)

How the Halakhah Unfolds: Volume Five: Hullin in the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Bavli, Part Two: Mishnah, Tosefta, and Bavli (474 pages)

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In separate multi-volume works, the project has presented form-analytical English translations of the Mishnah, Tosefta, Yerushalmi, and Bavli, outlined the Yerushalmi and the Bavli and compared these outlines.

In this volume, the main points of the Halakhah of the topological expositions or tractates of the Mishnah-Tosefta-Bavli Hullin are set forth and the theological message of the tractate is laid out. The project yields a systematic account of the Halakhah in its documentary unfolding.

The uniqueness of Tzvee Zahavy’s expertise in the academic study of the Talmud and in the analytical interpretation of Jewish prayer stems from his background, training, and accomplishment. He was ordained at Yeshiva University, where he studied with Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein. He received his PhD from Brown University where his mentor was Professor Jacob Neusner. He has taught more than 6000 students and received awards for his Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship from Yeshiva University and for Distinguished Teaching from the University of Minnesota. He was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the American Council of Learned Societies, and he served in 2009 as adjunct professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

The real measure of Jacob Neusner’s contribution to the study of religion emerges from the originality, excellence, and scope of his learning. He founded a field of scholarship: the academic study of Judaism. He built out of that field to influence a larger subject: the academic study of religion. He created durable networks and pathways of interreligious communication and understanding. —from the Encyclopaedia Judaica, second edition. 

For orders and information please contact the publisher University Press of America®, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706, www.univpress.com

Is NBA Star Amar'e Stoudemire Jewish?

Yes, NBA star Amar'e Stoudemire is a Jew. JPost has the story [hat tip to Barak].

...The 28-year-old NBA superstar had announced his plans to come to Israel via Twitter on Tuesday as he was boarding his flight.

“This is going to be a great trip,” Stoudemire wrote on his Twitter feed, “@Amareisreal.”

“The holy land. Learn about it,” he wrote, adding, “ze ha’halom sheli” – Hebrew for “this is my dream.”

With the 2009-10 NBA season over, and a $100 million deal signed earlier this month with the Knicks, the 6-foot, 10-inch, 249-pound (208-centimeter, 113-kilo) athlete decided to visit.

“I don’t really consider myself to be a religious person, but rather a deeply spiritual individual,” Stoudemire told the Post.

“I have been aware since my youth that I am a Hebrew through my mother, and that is something that has played a subtle but important role in my development,” he went on.

“I have never hid my spiritual roots,” he said. “They just weren’t something that came under the spotlight.”

Stoudemire added that he had always channeled his spirituality through the way he played basketball.

“I am proud to be a Hebrew and embrace my Jewish background,” he said Told that his new status might give him more “street cred” in his new home – as New York has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel – Stoudemire laughed deeply and said, “I look forward to that.

This season is going to be great, and bonding with the New York fans is going to be special also.

“I’d like to thank all my fans in Israel and my supporters worldwide,” he added. “I plan on having a great vacation and learning a whole lot as well.”

Stoudemire’s Twitter announcement had both the sports and Jewish worlds abuzz on Wednesday, with news organizations and bloggers speculating as to what a Jewish Stoudemire might mean.

“#1 Jewish athlete of all time” was the most common online response to the news, although others expressed hope that Stoudemire would join his NBA colleague, small forward Omri Casspi – who plays for the Sacramento Kings – on the Israeli national basketball team....more...

Is Stanley Fish Jewish?

Yes, Stanley Fish is a Jew. He once was a noted hotshot deconstructionist who caused all kinds of consternation at Duke University.

On his Times blog ("Is Religion Special") Fish summarizes the responses that he received to a recent blog post about religion,

...The entire point of religion — at least of the theistic kind, Christianity, Judaism, Islam — is to affirm a fidelity to an authority and to a set of imperatives that exceed, and sometimes clash with, what is required by the state. The denial of religion’s claim to be special is the denial of religion as an ultimate discourse, and is, in effect, the denial of religion as religion; it becomes just one more point of view....

Fish offers us more than opinions. He reports on court cases and decisions, facts and philosophers. He is quite a learned guy, an American literary theorist, legal scholar and a true public intellectual, worth reading.

Times: Does Film Director Oliver Stone Hate Jews? Is Oliver Stone Jewish?

Does director Oliver Stone hate Jews? Does he like Hitler? Who knows? We hope not. The man makes some awesome movies.

Is Oliver Stone Jewish? Here is how Wikipedia explains his religion, "[His] father was Jewish and his mother a Roman Catholic of French birth, and Stone was raised an Episcopalian as a compromise (but has since converted to Buddhism)." Isn't Hollywood grand?

A blog post at the Times (by BROOKS BARNES yet compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF whatever that means) sums up the current Oliver Stone imbroglio.

Oliver Stone found himself the catalyst of an online brush fire on Monday after he made comments published in The Sunday Times of London that were interpreted as anti-Semitic. In an interview with The Times to promote his documentary “South of the Border,” which is about South American politics, Mr. Stone defended Hitler. “Hitler was a Frankenstein, but there was also a Dr. Frankenstein,” he said. “German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support. Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.” Mr. Stone then proceeded to discuss what he called “the Jewish domination of the media,” adding with an expletive that Israel had messed up “United States foreign policy for years.” Bloggers quickly picked up on the comments, and the American Jewish Committee issued a news release condemning him. “By invoking this grotesque, toxic stereotype, Oliver Stone has outed himself as an anti-Semite,” the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in the release. Mr. Stone, whose next Hollywood movie, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” will be released by 20th Century Fox on Sept. 24, has stirred controversy with his comments in this arena before. In January the director told a gathering of television critics that “Hitler is an easy scapegoat” while discussing his Showtime nonfiction mini-series, “Secret History of America.” At that time the Simon Wiesenthal Center harshly rebuked him for the remarks. A spokesman for Mr. Stone was not immediately available to comment. 

Are Burqas Kosher?

Are burqas kosher?

To us the notion is bizarre that some Jewish women would cover their faces with their garments, in imitation of some Muslim women.

According to the blog "A Mother in Israel" who cites the source "Hadrei Haredim" that is what is happening in some neighborhoods of greater Jerusalem in Israel in 2010 (in Beit Shemesh, Jerusalem and Elad).

We can't say that this is a trend. But wow, these anecdotal accounts ought to wake up some of our friends who deny that there is a culture war going on in Judaism, and that we need to make clear that this behavior is by no stretch of the imagination a valid expression of Judaism.

So no, burqas are not kosher. They are not benign expressions of modesty. Wearing a burqa is an outright antisocial misogynist action of another faith that is rejected in all forms of real Judaism.

WSJ Reports Return of Rev. Ted Haggard

We wonder why the Wall Street Journal sees fit to covering the return to the ministry of the disgraced preacher Rev. Ted Haggard, "Humbled Haggard Climbs Back in Pulpit" by Stephanie Simon. The Journal is not known for its coverage of the religion beat.

Recall with Ms. Simon who precisely is this Rev. Haggard:

... Mr. Haggard was forced to resign nearly four years ago as president of the politically powerful National Association of Evangelicals and to step down from the megachurch he founded, after admitting that he had bought methamphetamine from, and had a sexual encounter with, a gay prostitute.

Once one of the most prominent church leaders in the U.S., Mr. Haggard confessed in a tortured letter, calling himself "a deceiver and a liar" who had long wrestled with desires he described as "repulsive and dark." He signed a contract promising to follow a path laid out by fellow clergy: to find a new career in a new state and to stay away from pastoral work....

Now, why does the leading business newspaper see fit to follow this story? The obvious answer is that the WSJ sees religion as just another business. And this then is an uplifting story of a disgraced businessman rebounding from bankruptcy to reenter the world of commerce.

Only this would not happen in most business environments. If suddenly and inexplicably paroled, Bernard Madoff would never be permitted to climb back into the investment business. Yeah. Religion is different. No standards.

What bothers us most in the story is the way it accounts for dishonesty that continues in the Haggard story line. Instead of fessing up to major sins (repeated violations of the sexual code of his own church) and taking credit for serious repentance (and moving on), Haggard minimizes his waywardness (it was a single instance of a massage gone wrong) and proclaims that he "over-repented."

Okay then. We've read lots of theology books from Judaism, Christianity and the other religions of the world. Credit Rev. Ted with a brand new idea in religion. He sinned a little and then repented too much.

We ponder just how weak is the church leadership in Colorado Springs to allow this guy back into town. The article informs us that some wacko NY theologian defends Haggard thusly:

"He has a humility of spirit and a recognition of how gripping sin can be in a person's life," said Paul DeVries, president of New York Divinity School, an evangelical seminary in Manhattan.

What humility of spirit? No, now this lying fraud minimizes and denies his sins. You can't have it both ways - minimize and recognize. Unless honesty, logic and consistency are outside your theological worldview.

Is Timothy Geithner Jewish? No

No, Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama's secretary of the treasury, is not a Jew.

Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Peter F. Geithner of Larchmont, N.Y.

According to the Times, he is married to Carole M. Sonnenfeld and has two children. The Rev. Thomas Keehn, a United Church of Christ minister, officiated at his wedding in 1985.

On 11/22/2008 I received an email reply from Geithner's father-in-law, Prof. Albert Sonnenfeld, confirming that, "Geithner (is) not Jewish, (he was) raised Episcopalian, but (is) hardly religious now."

The reference in Wikipedia that previously (up to 11/2008) said he is a Jew - was removed. See the discussion.

(Reposted.)

Was Ran Baratz Sacked by Hebrew U for his Right Wing Politics?

Ran Baratz appears to be an accomplished young philosopher with a PhD from Hebrew University. He was teaching there as an adjunct. He was not renewed.

This matter was first brought to our attention by Rabbi Jeffrey Woolf in an enigmatic Facebook posting on the situation.

We know that in the USA adjunct teaching employment is at-will. No reason need be given by a department for non-renewal. In most cases it is assumed that adjunct teaching is close-ended, not ongoing.

Now Baratz claims that he is a victim of persecution by Hebrew University due to his right wing politics. Richard Silverstein investigated the allegation and comments on his blog, Tikkun Olam.

Instant Talmudic Analysis: If Baratz is so desirable then the right wing Shalem College, where he holds a fellowship, should snap him up and hire him as a tenure track professor on the spot.

If this is a fake victim ploy by a non-renewed adjunct named Baratz, designed to try to make the liberal establishment look bad, then Baratz' career in academe is toast.

YouTube Video: Is the Ground Zero Mosque Kosher?

Some lunatics want to stop the building of an Islamic Community Center in downtown Manhattan. Those nutty Republicans are always looking for enemies.

Hat tip to the intelligent blog post at the New Yorker, Close Read, Live From Ground Zero, Posted by Amy Davidson.

We add that it's a great idea to have a Muslim building downtown.

Consider it an insurance policy against a future attack. So yes, we believe that the so-called Ground Zero Mosque is kosher.

New Yorker Cartoon: The Bris-A-mole Video Game

Times Magazine Jeffrey Rosen on Internet Gossip

The Times Magazine front page story next Sunday, "The Web Means the End of Forgetting" By JEFFREY ROSEN, cites the Talmud, as if a statement here or there in that large composite literature represents a core value accepted by all authorities.

We suppose it sounds nice to cite some ancient wisdom, but it sure does nothing for us to illuminate the issues he seeks to explore, namely how to remove personal information from the Internet.

We have no clue what were the "Talmudic villages" that Rosen talks about. We never heard the term before. Rosen invented the notion, filled in one or two ideas he gleaned from Talmudic sources as if they were practiced in his imaginary towns and went off on his merry way.

If that is indicative of the rest of his claims and information in this article, then it is a work of random imagination with no connection to any reality of past, present or future and no insight in what is a troubling trend in modern communications.

...FORGIVENESS
In addition to exposing less for the Web to forget, it might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleadingly called a “global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people — oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean — was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But the Talmudic villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the Internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip: although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged. In the Talmud, people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they may have atoned and grown spiritually from their mistakes. “If a man was a repentant [sinner],” the Talmud says, “one must not say to him, ‘Remember your former deeds.’ ”

Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slates clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor....more...

PS Mr. Rosen, before you celebrate the enlightened values of your fictional Talmudic hamlets, try suppressing any bit of the gossip about the biblical figures of ancient Israel that spice up our sacred literature from Genesis to II Kings and beyond.

Was Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo'ole Jewish?

No, the lyrical Hawaiian singer Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo'ole, despite his name, was not a Jew.

IZ's recording with ukulele accompaniment of "Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World" is just one of the sweetest songs of all times. It reached #12 on Billboard's Hot Digital Tracks chart the week of January 31, 2004 and passed the 2 million paid downloads mark in the USA in September, 2009. It's well worth the 99 cents.

IZ died tragically at age 38. Wikipedia reports, "The Hawaii State Flag flew at half-staff on July 10, 1997, the day of Kamakawiwoʻole's funeral. His koa wood coffin lay in state at the Capitol building in Honolulu. He was the third person in Hawaiian history to be accorded this honor, and the only one who was not a government official."

Is Andrew Breitbart Jewish?

Yes, Andrew Breitbart is a Jew. The conservative pundit says he "grew up in Brentwood (i.e., Los Angeles, California) a secular liberal Jew" who celebrated his bar mitzvah and "has the tape to prove it." How funny and clever.

As far as we can tell, Breitbart is a gotcha politician who has not brought a single drop of value to the world. He epitomizes all that is wrong with the right. New Yorker magazine has profiled him in brutally unflattering terms.

Rage Machine: Andrew Breitbart’s empire of bluster
by Rebecca Mead

On Sunday, March 21st, the day that the House voted to pass health-care reform, Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Internet entrepreneur, was thousands of miles away, at home in Westwood, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. Breitbart, who in the past year has become a fixture on Fox News and a regular at Tea Party events, spends a lot of time on the road. In the preceding weeks, he had addressed the California Republican Spring Convention, in Santa Clara—“It’s warfare to save the soul of the United States of America,” he told the audience—and had introduced Sarah Palin at the National Tea Party Convention, in Nashville...more...

/repost from 5/20/10/

Times: Mendel Werdyger Restores the Recordings of Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt

Bravo to Mendel Werdyger who has restored the recordings of Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt.

Download a track - Kol Nidrei - for $.99 at Amazon.

Note well: Berger has omitted the context of Jewish music, writing as if this publication were something amazing. The quality is pretty good, judging from the track on Amazon, but not superb. And there is a possibility that some people will not like to hear Kol Nidre accompanied by an organ.

We suggest you listen to Richard Tucker's Kol Nidre album snippets on Amazon as an alternative before you run out to get the Rosenblatt CDs. The whole album is $9.98 and you may find it more to your taste. Who can predict?

Bit by Electronic Bit, a Cantor’s Voice Is Restored
By JOSEPH BERGER

He was called the Jewish Caruso. Indeed, fervent enthusiasts sometimes referred to Caruso as the Italian Yossele Rosenblatt.

Mr. Rosenblatt, who died in 1933, was regarded as the greatest cantor of his time. But his was a time when music was recorded on heavy shellac or celluloid 78 r.p.m. records. The quality of those recordings was never that faithful in the first place and wore away over the years.

Enter Mendel Werdyger, a lush-bearded 52-year-old Hasidic Jew who runs a record shop on 13th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn. With no college degree and no professional training in sound engineering, Mr. Werdyger has used advanced audio restoration programs on the ordinary computer in his ragtag office to patiently clean away the crackles, hisses and other distortions on those creaky old 78s.

Times: Frank Rich Says a Premature Kaddish for Mel Gibson

Not so fast Frank Rich. Don't go saying Kaddish for Mel Gibson.

Rich wrote on Sunday recalling how Mel got away with so much in another era long ago - namely in 2004 - when he released his film on Jesus.

Aside: We loved the idea of a hit Hollywood movie in Aramaic. And we hated the anti-Semitic overtones that it had - but that was not Mel's fault. Blame all that on the Gospels themselves.

Rich nostalgically opines in his op-ed, "The Good News About Mel Gibson" (ha-ha, clever title):

...It was into that tinderbox of America 2004 that Gibson tossed his self-financed and self-directed movie about the crucifixion, “The Passion of the Christ.” The epic was timed to detonate in the nation’s multiplexes on Ash Wednesday, after one of the longest and most divisive promotional campaigns in Hollywood history.

Gibson is in such disgrace today that it’s hard to fathom all the fuss he and his biblical epic engendered back then. The commotion began with the revelation that his father, Hutton, was a prominent and vociferous Holocaust denier and that both father and son were proselytizers for a splinter sect of Roman Catholicism that rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including the lifting of the “Christ-killers” libel from the Jews. Jewish leaders and writers understandably worried that “The Passion” might be as anti-Semitic as the Passion plays of old. Gibson’s response was to hold publicity screenings for the right-wing media and political establishment, including a select Washington soiree attended by notables like Peggy Noonan, Kate O’Beirne and Linda Chavez. (The only nominal Jew admitted was Matt Drudge.) The attendees then used their various pulpits to assure the world that the movie was divine — and certainly nothing that should trouble Jews. “I can report it is free of anti-Semitism,” vouchsafed Robert Novak after his “private viewing.”

Uninvited Jewish writers (like me) who kept raising questions about the unreleased film and its exclusionary rollout were vilified for crucifying poor Mel. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News asked a reporter from Variety “respectfully” if Gibson was being victimized because “the major media in Hollywood and a lot of the secular press is controlled by Jewish people.” Such was the ugly atmosphere of the time that these attempts at intimidation were remarkably successful. Many mainstream media organizations did puff pieces on the star or his film, lest they be labeled “anti-Christian” when an ascendant religious right was increasingly flexing its muscles in the corridors of power in Washington. ...more...

That was then, this is now. Rich believes that Gibson has been disgraced and that the right wing cadre that supported him have imploded and are no longer influential. Yisgadal viyisqadash...

As they say in Hebrew, "Haleveye" -- if only that were true. We hope it is....but...

Unfortunately, we feel around us the simmering heat of right wing anger ready to boil over or explode. And that is within the Jewish community vis a vis Obama and the current administration. We can but wonder what kind of lava is waiting to erupt from the Christian right and where all that will end up when the rumbling volcano of animosity does blow. Don't say Kaddish for Mel just yet.

Times: Cultural Study of the Sabbath

Judith Shulevitz wrote an article in the Cultural Studies series in the Times, "Creating Sabbath Peace Amid the Noise." We appreciate aspects of her book on the Sabbath, as we said in a prior post.

So nu, what's in this article? Two anecdotes about Jews who have their own ideas of the Sabbath, one from a Brooklyn Heights couple and one from a Persian Jew on the Upper West Side. Then for balance, Shulevitz appends two anecdotes about Christians who observe some sort of Sabbath. Voila, we have a "Cultural Study."

We are reminded that there actually are real cultural methods for analyzing and understanding the ideas and practices of the Sabbath. We served on a doctoral committee at the University of Minnesota for a thesis that applied leisure studies theory to the Jewish Sabbath and concluded that it was in large measure a deliberate and periodic re-creation of a wilderness experience within an urban culture. That was an actual "study" with references to a literature and theories.

As we suggested, Shulevitz has produced an essay that is mostly a faux study with charming anecdotage. That's too bad because her book has a whole lot more content and thoughtfulness (although intermixed with heavy doses of personal spiritual reflections). We find it discouraging that a writer apparently had to dumb down her presentation for the readers of the New York Times.

So here is a sample from the start.

THERE are people for whom the Sabbath never went away — Seventh-day Adventists, Hutterites, Jews whose fathers and mothers never stopped walking in the ways of their fathers and mothers.

And then there are the rest of us. The Sabbath, Jewish or Christian, is a distant memory for many Americans, the recollection of a quaintly tranquil day when stores were closed, streets were quiet and festive dinners were had. The Sabbath would seem to have no place in our busy, beeping world. The very word tastes musty in the mouth, as if it were a relic from another place and time...more...

We stop here since all this is problematic to begin with. The traditional Sabbath today is practiced as it was observed centuries ago. It is a relic-Sabbath -- and it is a relic from the past. Like a Renaissance Fair or Colonial Williamsburg, some people with no musty taste in their mouths do reenact the ancient Sabbath in modern times and that is the point of it all. But what then is the meaning of the original Sabbath?

We need a lot of work on this essay, Ms. Shulevitz. More accurate description would help it. And a layer of actual academic analysis based on real social and cultural theory would be nice. And yes, even a summary of Orthodox apologetics defending the reenactment of the Sabbath in today's world would help this article.

We do like the illustration that accompanies the article.