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Dear friends, This past week, I was invited to take part with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in a dialogue /interview on a radio show run by Roseanne Barr and someone her producer kept calling "her boyfriend Johnny." The producer kept repeating that while Rabbi Boteach was very right-wing, Roseanne was very left-wing and it would be an interesting conversation. I sent him a few questions I thought would be interesting to pursue — the role of religion in general and Judaism in particular in dealing with wars like Iraq, wih the danger of global scorching, and with sexual ethics. The producer...

A particularly troubling aspect of the news coverage of the gruesome massacre at Virginia Tech is the fact that no one seems to hate the killer, Cheo Seung-Hui. Indeed, he is not even referred to as a killer or a murderer. Cheo is invariably described as a gunman or a shooter. A gunman implies someone who goes to a local gun range a few times a month, and a shooter connotes someone who pops off a couple of rounds in the woods with friends. It conveys nothing of the monstrous nature of Cheo's crimes, the cold-blooded and deliberate slaughter of...

I grew up in the US during the 1970s, the one decade universally acknowledged to have truly sucked. In 1970s America we danced to disco music, wore leisure suits and watched the Brady Bunch. But if that wasn't torture enough, we had Jimmy Carter as our president. I can still recall how depressing it was to watch his taciturn face on TV announcing one catastrophe after another, from the skyrocketing misery index, to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to the capture of our hostages in Iran, to the tragically-botched rescue attempt to free them. Jimmy Carter was arguably the most...

The Talmud famously says that a man is known in three ways. What he says when he is drunk, what he says when he is angry, and what he spends his money on. On all three counts, it appears that Mel Gibson has sadly shown his true colours. Upon getting arrested for drunk driving, in his inebriated state, he allegedly said something to the effect that "f---ing Jews are responsible for all the world's wars." In his anger, he asked the arresting deputy if he himself was Jewish. And, of course, he spent $25 million (U.S.) of his own money...

University men in the Western world view going to college as an arena for the fulfillment of their unbridled lust, and it is these intellectual crossroads wherein one finds, ironically, the greatest contempt for women. Sadly, unless it leads to some terrible tragedy, like rape, nobody cares.

A funny thing happened to me the other day when my wife and I had, thank God, another baby (a boy). Many of my friends didn’t seem all that happy for me. Sure, they went through the motions of smiles and congratulations. But it was evident that many thought me insane. Why would a young man and his wife ruin their lives with eight children? Who could afford the day-school bills? Didn’t we want to live life a little, and not just be burdened with kids? It got downright surreal when a European film company pressed me, while my wife...

While serving as rabbi at Oxford University, I befriended a young African-American Rhodes scholar by the name of Cory Booker who became like a brother to me. Because of Cory’s immense popularity within our student organization, the Oxford L’Chaim Society, he was voted in as co-president 1992, serving as leader of an organization of more than 4,000 student members. Many in the Anglo-Jewish community were puzzled at a non-Jew serving at the head of a Jewish organization, especially when pictures of Cory, with a yarmulke on his head introducing our speaker Mikhail Gorbachev, appeared throughout the UK press. But to...

The American family is broken. It consists of constituent parts that do not cohere. It comprises husbands and wives who are not intimate. And it is producing children who are not secure. In hosting the upcoming TLC Television series, "Shalom in the Home," and taping the episodes that will begin to air in 2006, I have come to understand the problems that are tearing the modern family asunder. First, there is the work-too-hard burnout of the modern mother and wife. Working outside the home to provide the family with the all-important second income, and coming home to children who are...

It was puzzling for the mostly African-American guests at Camp Williams – who had been evacuated from a destroyed New Orleans to Utah – to suddenly see a rabbi with a yarmulke about to address them in their temporary military home. It was even stranger for them to suddenly recognize that that rabbi was the radio host whom the Utah papers had been reporting all week had lost his radio show after using his program to stage an event that would assist the evacuees to find permanent homes in the white, middle-class neighborhoods that Mormon Utah is famous for. And...

Just a little over a month ago I visited the Gulf Coast states of Mississippi and Louisiana on a radio road trip across America's Deep South. When I arrived on Bourbon Street in the French quarter of New Orleans, with its sex shops and year-round Mardi Gras drunkenness, I told my listeners, jokingly, that no doubt the Big Easy (as New Orleans is known) would one day be swallowed by the earth in some awesome display of the divine wrath. The joke became all too real in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that devastated the Gulf Coast, leaving New...

Do not use my tax dollars for disengagement By SHMULEY BOTEACH Ariel Sharon prides himself on being a pioneer, Israel's human bulldozer, the man who is always out in front, who achieves the impossible, who breaks through all barriers. Well, chalk up yet another first to this stubbornly audacious man, for Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to have caused Israel's staunchest allies, America's evangelical Christians, to come out against the Israeli government.

Ariel Sharon prides himself on being a pioneer, Israel's human bulldozer, the man who is always out in front, who achieves the impossible, who breaks through all barriers. Well, chalk up yet another first to this stubbornly audacious man, for Sharon is the first Israeli prime minister to have caused Israel's staunchest allies, America's evangelical Christians, to come out against the Israeli government. It is indeed a singular achievement to take your greatest friends and make them into enemies. Sharon has now done this twice. First, with the settler community, who were hoodwinked into believing that Sharon was their ally....

Let us say for a moment that we who oppose the withdrawal from Gaza were to belatedly and begrudgingly accept the calculus of disengagement. Imagine for a moment that Prime Minister Sharon is right. Eight-thousand Jews living in the midst of 1.3 million Palestinians have no future. The military commitment of protecting the settlers is just too expensive and the potential loss of life too costly. It's time to pull out. It's painful, but logical. There are other places in Israel for the settlers to live, and these brave pioneers dare not allow themselves to become obstacles to peace. There...

In May 1995, Christopher Reeve was taking part in a cross-country equestrian event when a fall caused his skull to literally become separated from his spinal cord. He was totally paralyzed. Of that moment he later said, "It dawned on me I was going to be a huge burden to everybody, that I had ruined my life and everybody else's. Not fair to anybody. The best thing to do would be to slip away." When his wife, Dana, came into his room he looked at her and mouthed the words, "Maybe we should let me go." His wife started crying...

I never believed that I would live in a country that would, in effect, execute a brain-damaged woman who never hurt anyone in her life. The story of Terri Schiavo should outrage every decent American. While our soldiers valiantly fight and die across the sea so complete strangers can enjoy human rights, here at home an American woman who suffered severe brain damage 15 years ago is being subjected to death by dehydration and starvation by order of a judge. Today, her feeding tube was removed. The humanity of every society is determined first and foremost by how it treats...

I never believed that I would live in a country that would, in effect, execute a brain-damaged woman who never hurt anyone in her life. The story of Terri Schiavo should outrage every decent American. While our soldiers valiantly fight and die across the sea so complete strangers can enjoy human rights, here at home an American woman who suffered severe brain damage 15 years ago is being subjected to death by dehydration and starvation by order of a judge. Today, her feeding tube was removed. The humanity of every society is determined first and foremost by how it treats...

Arguably, the biggest problem in American culture today is the fact that mere entertainers are its heroes. There is no precedent in any civilization in the history of the world for entertainers – actors, singers, dancers and directors – to be elevated to the highest positions of prominence in the culture. That's why none of us can name actors and actresses from ancient Greece or Rome. They weren't important enough to be remembered. Sure, we can name the playwrights and we can name the satirists. We can name the politicians, the philosophers and the generals. Because literary, academic, political and...

The recent undercover operation by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals at AgriProcessors Inc., a kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, was a public-relations coup for the militant animal-rights group. A volunteer who got a job at the plant used a hidden camera to videotape the slaughter of animals, which PETA posted on its website in late November. In one stroke, the activists simultaneously managed to sicken people with graphic images of animal carnage and enrage them about the practices of Jewish ritual slaughter, or shechitah. To boot, the group promoted itself as the fearless and innovative champion of animal...

Schmuley Boteach seems, on the surface, to be a pleasant, erudite Rabbi popular with the TV crowd because he presents himself well on TV interviews, is popular with the Hollyweird crowd, and voices some views that sync with pop culture, howbeit with a conservative religious wrapping. Recently 'Schmuley', as he is called by his acquaintances, was a guest on Michael Medved's talkshow, and once again affirmed to this observer that he [Rabbi Boteach] only seeks harmony between Christians and Jews on his own terms: which includes the emasculation of basic Christian tenets. The christian New Testament is a collection of...

The aristocracy of the beautiful is becoming increasingly pronounced in the Western world, with looks and figure trumping talent and effort in the professional marketplace. Even in such serious professions as broadcast journalism, appearance has become more important than substance. Just try to find a new female television anchor who doesn't look like a Nordic goddess, or, if she has to be a brunette, isn't glamorous, thin and beautiful. The practice of valuing a woman based on her high cheekbones instead of her intelligence reached its zenith when CNN advertised its new anchor, Paula Zahn, as "just a little bit...