By Israel Drazin In “A Message to the New Chief Rabbis,” in the Jerusalem Post of August 16, 2013, the prominent Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, chief rabbi of Efrat, reports the halakhic (Jewish legal) ruling of the highly respected Rav Moshe Feinstein. Rav Feinstein addressed the question: do wives and husbands need a get, [...]
Review by Israel Drazin Marriage and Divorce in the Jewish State Israel’s Civil War By Susan M. Weiss & Netty C. Gross-Horowitz Brandeis University Press, 2013, 218 pages In 1953, the Israeli government acquiesced to far right religious elements in the state and enacted the restrictive Rabbinic Courts Jurisdiction Law, [...]
By Israel Drazin Why do people feel that they should listen to their clergy? There is nothing in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, or Koran that says that its adherents must obey rabbis, priests, and imams. In fact, Judaism didn’t have rabbis until around the year 70 of the Common Era, after the second [...]
