Jeffrey Schein

  • Soon the large canon of scholarship about Mordecai Kaplan will be expanded. Jenna Weissman Joselit,  the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at George Washington University. She is currently at work on a biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan for the Jewish Lives series of Yale University Press. Our Kaplan Center…

    Read More

  • God and the Digital Age

    Text Me, and a Powerful Poem Later this summer the volume Text Me: Ancient Jewish Wisdom Meets Contemporary Technology (Jewish Resources for Understanding, Embracing, and Challenging our Evolving Digital Identity) will be published by Hamilton Press.  I have shared with readers of the Kaplan Center website in an earlier column the ways in which the project seems…

    Read More

  • Why I Have Always Hated the Aleynu, and Why I Changed My Mind on Feb 26: A Kaplanian Struggle Jeffrey Schein I have a very vivid picture in my mind. My Bubbie is davening in Suwalki, Poland around 1890. As the Aleynu builds resonance and the phrase, “God has not made us like the other…

    Read More

  • The Waves and Undulations of the Pandemic

    In The Twinkling of An Eye: Five Features of the Upcoming Pandemic Transitions by Rabbi Jeffrey Schein This article was originally published on March 18, 2021 at eJewishPhilanthropy. Prelude  We will soon be going through a transition. Some prefer to call it the movement towards a “new” normal. In our volume L’Dor V’Dor in the…

    Read More

  • Pandemic, Pods, and Havurot Jonathan Rosen in The Talmud and the Internet (2000) explored the meandering, highly associational nature of Talmudic thought.  A word or phrase in one context is connected with lightning-like speed with the same word or phrase in a different passage, and a new meaning is often derived from the connection. I…

    Read More

  • To Mask or Not to Mask: That is the Question

    The Masked Rider I think we are forever searching for  the sweet spot where Jewish texts illuminate our life as American Jews, particularly today.   I understand that identifying where and how our two civilizations meet to be a Kaplanian imperative. So I now return to the “Text Me” project previously described and search out the meeting…

    Read More