From the general media and Jewish weeklies published in most large American cities the reader will learn more than he cares to about the political and social doings of what Ze’ev Chafets calls “federated Judaism,” an interlocking directorate of the leadership of upscale synagogues, the fund-raising community federations, and the inevitable country clubs. These people...
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November 1, 1988April 21, 2022Vital Signs
Who Speaks for the Jews?
Just before the Minnesota caucuses, one of the nation’s ten or so largest Reform Jewish synagogues, Minneapolis’s Temple Israel, cosponsored a political speech by Kitty Dukakis at the synagogue’s regular Friday evening sabbath service. Temple Israel is typical of many synagogues around the country where liberal Democrats are regularly endorsed from the pulpit. The fondness...
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August 1, 1988April 21, 2022Vital Signs
Tort Law Threatens Urban Development
A recent action by a Minneapolis judge has such a potential for inhibiting economic development of our central cities that, if a decision by a putatively less high-minded apostle of judicial restraint had anywhere near a similar impact, the miscreant would be pilloried from Cambridge to Berkeley for condemning the nation’s ghettos to further impoverishment....
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February 1, 1987April 21, 2022Correspondence
Letter From Minneapolis Criminal Chic
The gap between Middle Americans and our cultural elite is nowhere wider than on questions of crime and punishment. While activists on the bench and in academia have crafted ever more rights and privileges for those accused and even convicted of crimes, they have given short shrift to the rights and welfare of current and...