I have read “Googling for God” over and over again, and I still can’t figure out whether or not Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s front page opinion piece in the Sept. 20 issue of “The New York Times Sunday Review” is meant to be taken …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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10/29/15
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The very first time I heard Bob Dylan sing was way back in the summer of 1963 or 1964 at a relatively small ocean-front venue off the boardwalk in Asbury Park, N.J. The evening belonged to the folk-singer Joan Baez, but at one point she introduced …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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11/7/13
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In my column four weeks ago (May 13), I wrote about my teacher and mentor, Rabbi Eugene Borowitz, who died Jan. 20, a month before his 92nd birthday. I noted that the first of his 17 books, “A …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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6/9/16
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Paul Berger begins his May 5 online article for the Forward with this sentence: “Long written off by mainstream critics as an Islamophobic crackpot, Pamela Geller is winning increasing sums from financial backers with her blood-and-thunder …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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6/5/15
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In his introduction to “The Road to Character” (Random House, 2015), New York Times columnist David Brooks acknowledges his indebtedness to Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993). In …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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3/4/18
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I found my way via a footnote in the Jan. 9, 2014, issue of “The New York Review of Books” to an essay by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau, “Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Beethoven and God.” With a title like that, how could I not read it?
The essay, …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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2/13/14
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While Rabbi Rosenberg is recovering from back surgery, he has chosen a past column to run in this space. This column originally appeared on April 3, 2009.
Ever since I first encountered …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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12/8/17
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“Family Werth” is the title of Providence writer Ronald Florence’s most recent novel, self-published earlier this year. The title is a pun, for time and time again the characters call into question the worth of families in general and the …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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8/2/13
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My undergraduate years at Columbia, 1962-1966, corresponded with the height of the folk-singing craze which, centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village, spread throughout the land. Armed with my guitar and my long-neck 5-string banjo, I was a …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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10/23/14
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“Hold fast to dreams/For if dreams die/Life is a broken-winged bird/That cannot fly.” So begins an eight-line poem by Langston Hughes (1902-1967), one of America’s most …
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Rabbi James Rosenberg
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11/11/16
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