Search results for: Modern Orthodox

Nishma, a one-year-old sociological and market research firm, published a new study titled “The Nishma Profile of American Modern Orthodox Jews.” While the survey attempts to present an objective view of the Modern Orthodox community’s thoughts on religious life, the results provide instructive, and perhaps unintended, information about the respondents’ financial, rather than social or religious, concerns. Some observers have sought to focus on the answers it gives to potentially divisive questions about women in Orthodoxy, referring specifically to the “schism” about women serving as rabbis. However, the starker results of the survey reach a conclusion that, by far, unites all factions of the Modern Orthodox community. That concern is, in fact, how to support children and pay tuition for them to attend Jewish schools, how to keep kosher in a world with increasingly rising costs, and how to survive in increasingly expensive neighborhoods.

According to instructions issued by Education Minister Shai Piron, from now on, if half of the parents in state-religious educational middle and high schools request that their daughters study Talmud, they should be allowed to do so. This is the first time that the Education Ministry sets criteria for Talmud studies for girls in state-religious school.

Seven years after her daughter, Mattat, and niece, Kinneret, were killed in a terrorist ambush in the Etzion Bloc, Rivka Rosenfeld has established a website that brings together religious women before and after military service. This is not a solemn static memorial site but a dynamic website, which recently has become a mandatory stop for religious girls who are planning their military or national service after high school.

In light of recent developments in the Modern Orthodox community's approach to homosexuality, this article presents a classroom discussion on homosexuality that took place at a Modern Orthodox high school. An examination of the discussion's heteroglossia, or multiplicity of languages existing in tension, along with attention to the discussion's turn-taking structures, reveals the teacher's high degree of control over what students could express. This controlling pedagogy consistently suppresses expressions of empathy in favor of legalistic assertions. This article questions whether the specific issue of homosexuality demands a different approach.