After a deeply troubling act of hate, Portnoy condemned the behavior and proudly held his ground against the media; he acted quickly and unflinchingly and modeled how hate should be handled because it was simply the right thing to do. Sadly, Portnoy’s immediate, strong and principled pushback is far too rare.

There is a growing chorus in higher education that says the Trump administration is weaponizing its efforts to combat antisemitism for its own ideological ends. Whether true or not, the public debate around Jew-hatred, free speech and the rule of law is putting Jews in an age-old bind.

When I was growing up in London, I attended Orthodox Jewish day school where Ashkenazi culture shaped nearly every aspect of Jewish life. I was one of just a few Mizrahi kids, and I have distinct memories of being looked at as an “other.” My food was different. The way my family celebrated holidays was different. Even the Jewish studies curriculum — whether it was history or Torah — reflected a tradition that felt unfamiliar.

Demonology, the ‘science of demons’, has always comprised two complementary facets – the one theoretical and the other practical. If one was to battle one’s enemy effectively, one first had to know him, his human confederates, his disguises, his ruses. I use the singular here, because in many of the world’s religious traditions, the demonic hordes were held in the thrall of a single great embodiment of evil, an arch-rival to a benevolent God or gods.

The idea of becoming like your parent is rarely offered as a compliment and even more rarely taken as one. People naturally resist the idea that some kind of genetic or environmental vortex is sucking them into being a version of someone else, especially when that someone is an immediate forebear about whom they probably harbor some ambivalent feelings. Even if your mom and dad really were in fact wonderful, and you felt nothing but love and admiration for them, we do still all want to be uniquely ourselves.

The fact that Lag B’Omer practices emerged later doesn’t weaken them — it reflects the awesome power we have to shape our story. That’s the genius of Judaism. Our traditions aren’t relics. They are responses. Our Jewish calendar isn’t static — it’s evolving. We are tasked not just with living through history but with transforming it into Jewish memory.

Later in Parashat Emor, this word arises again when we are commanded to have “one standard” for “stranger and citizen (ezrach) alike.”

This is an injunction that the Torah repeats again and again, but is it oxymoronic? Isn’t citizenship definitionally the measure of difference between how the law regards those who have it and those who don’t?

And if it is, should we reject such concepts altogether? Don’t lead to a pernicious dividing of the world into “us” and “them.”

Shofar is narrow at the opening where we blow/wider at the end where the sound blasts. We can learn from hostages and soldiers who “blew the shofar”:

The shofar is narrow where we put our efforts. This represents difficult moments, which offer us the opportunity to make a blast, to change ordinary into holy.

When a loved one dies, we are mandated to let our hair grow; and then mandated to cut it. We mourn, and then we get back to work. We cannot live in the state of perpetual mourning, but we must make space for it. There is a time to cut our hair, but before that we must make time to let it grow.

Twice in its history, Jewish sovereignty collapsed in the last quarter of its first century. Yoav Heller believes Israel must heed this warning.

On May 4, 2025, a ballistic missile traveling up to sixteen times faster than the speed of sound struck ground close to the terminal at Ben-Gurion airport, halting flight traffic and leaving a crater at the point of impact. It was the first time that the airport buildings themselves have been so close to a successful missile attack.

Haviv and John talked about whether victory was in the cards against Hamas, what it would require, and whether Israeli society would persevere; about claims of starvation and genocide and the role of propaganda in conflict; about whether Gazans all support Hamas; about the distinction between civilian and combatant and what it might mean for the IDF to be, as many Israel defenders say, the “most moral” army; about Netanyahu’s leadership and politicking over the past 19 months; about whether Israel could go it alone on Iran; and finally, about what the rise of a new American antisemitism might mean for the biggest diaspora Jewish community in all of history.