Jonathan Feldstein
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Sounding the Shofar as a Wake-Up Call for Jews
In the month preceding Rosh Hashanah, Jews sound the shofar as a wake-up call and reminder that it’s time to take into account shortcomings and outright sins, and to seek forgiveness from one another and from God. Throughout our Rosh Hashanah worship services, the shofar is sounded repeatedly, reminding us of this yet again. If …
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Celebrating a Modern Persian Heroine
Marzi Amirizadeh is not a Persian queen. Unlike Esther, an orphan in Persia expelled from Judea following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and exile of the Jewish people, Marzi is a native of Persia. Today, that’s Iran. She lives in the United States, her adopted country where, like Esther, she has risen to the occasion …
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Everything You Wanted to Know About Hanukkah But Were Afraid to Ask
Read Time: 4 Minutes 42 Seconds Recently, I was asked to teach about Hanukkah with a church group in Dallas. I entered the conversation thinking it was really quite straight forward, that most Christians at least in America surrounded by a Judeo-Christian culture know the basics about the holiday. I began by relating a story …
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Why Kanye’s Antisemitism Matters
Read Time: 5 Minutes 32 Seconds One doesn’t just wake up and make a string of anti-Semitic remarks without some deep seeded hatred of Jewish people. The latest example came from none other than the famous entertainer/designer Kanye West (Ye). His mental illness is not an excuse. Kanye’s hateful rants demonstrate a great paradox of …
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Orthodox Jew: The October I Didn’t Get Married
Read Time: 5 Minutes, 20 Seconds In July 1985, I got engaged. The plan was to get married in October 1987, or at least begin the process to get married. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t have just eloped, gone to a local court or organized a more traditional Jewish wedding as would have been my …
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Orthodox Jew: The Miraculous Return of the Red Heifer to Israel
Read Time: 4 Minutes, 4 Seconds American Airlines flight 146 touched down at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on time, arriving from New York’s JFK airport as one of the dozens of flights that arrive in Israel from the US daily. While a regularly scheduled flight, among the passengers there were five whose arrival in Israel …
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Why the Munich Olympics Massacre Is Still in Israel’s Psyche 50 Years Later
This week, Mika Slavin and all of Israel should be celebrating. We should be celebrating the milestone of Israel’s first Olympic medal, 50 years ago. Instead, it is a day of mourning. It marks the 50th anniversary of the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games, and specifically the murder of …
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Orthodox Jew: Living Modestly in a Hyper-Sexualized World
I can’t count the number of pastors who had confided in me about issues relating to modesty in their churches. Many will tell me how distraught they are when they see their members out at the mall or in some other setting, dressed in ways that would never correspond to the religious values which they …
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