​In How God Works: The Science Behind the Benefits of Religion (Simon & Schuster), Northeastern University Psychology professor David DeSteno asserts that even skeptics, not just believers, can draw strength and comfort from religion in their personal lives. "Science and religion," he writes, "have often been at odds. But if we remove the theology -- views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like -- from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates."

Throughout his well-researched book, DeSteno demonstrates how psychological insights on well-being align with religious practices across faith communities. He believes that in combination, these disciplines can provide believers and non-believers with a toolbox for coping with the vicissitudes of human existence.

Like many before him, DeSteno describes how religious life-cycle events, prayers, rituals, and liturgies anchored to the concepts of virtue, empathy, compassion and gratitude can provide a healthy rootedness in one's life.
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So far so good.

Elie Wiesel is generally known as a famous Holocaust survivor and author of the book Night. In his succinct new biography, Elie Wiesel: Humanist Messenger For Peace (Routledge), Professor Alan L. Berger brilliantly portrays his former teacher and Nobel Peace Prize winner as a global champion of universal human rights who had an extraordinary impact on contemporary American political, religious, and cultural life.

Berger, the chair for Holocaust Studies at Florida Atlantic University, recounts Wiesel’s 1928 early life in the small Romanian village of Sighet in the Carpathian Mountains and how his father urged Eliezer to read the world’s classic literature while his mother pressed him to engage in intensive Torah study in the broadest sense of the term. That parental combination shaped Wiesel’s career as a gifted author who wrote in French and English (neither was his native language) while being fully anchored in both Hebrew and Yiddish.

Wiesel survived the Shoah as a teenage prisoner at two infamous Nazi German death camps: Auschwitz in Poland and Buchenwald in Germany.  His immediate family was shattered during the Holocaust. Both his parents and one of Wiesel’s three sisters were murdered. When World War II ended, the orphan made his way to Paris, learned French and began a career as a journalist. In 1949 Wiesel became the Paris correspondent for the Israel newspaper Yediot Ahronot.

  A major turning point in Wiesel’s life occurred in 1954, when he interviewed Francois Mauriac, the Catholic Nobel Prize winner for literature. Mauriac urged the young survivor to write about his death camp experiences.

(RNS) — The death of Bob Moses on Sunday (July 25) at age 86 should make anyone who dares meddle with Americans’ voting rights in this country pause. The life of the great educator and civil rights leader in Mississippi during the turbulent and violent 1960s reminds us that there may be no more noble cause and that it attracts powerful champions.


I met the 29-year-old Moses at the Morning Star Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in February 1964, when I was a young rabbi serving Congregation B’Nai Jehudah in Kansas City, Missouri. Like millions of Americans, I had been deeply moved months before by the huge civil rights rally that drew hundreds of thousands of people to the Lincoln Memorial.
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In February 1964, the Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City sent me to Hattiesburg as its official representative to participate in the interreligious Ministers’ Project, which included rabbis, Presbyterian pastors and Episcopal priests from all over the country. I spent a week in Mississippi supporting the town’s African Americans, who were cynically forced to take a detailed and lengthy test that only a constitutional scholar could pass, designed to systematically deprive them of their vote.

In 2010, during Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan’s tense Senate confirmation hearing, Lindsay Graham (R-SC), who supported her nomination, jokingly asked President Barack Obama’s nominee what she did on Christmas Day.  It was a strange, even bizarre question because it had nothing to do with her judicial qualifications. But Kagan’s humorous reply completely disarmed her Senatorial opponents: “Like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” But there is much more to the Jewish-Chinese connection than choosing food from column A or column B on a menu on December 25th.

In his fascinating book, The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China (Penguin), Jonathan Kaufman tells the little-known history of how two remarkable Sephardic families became major economic and political forces in China.  
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Originally from Baghdad, the Sassoons and the Kadoories established rival commercial empires during the 19th and 20th centuries in Shanghai and Hong Kong. For more than 175 years, these families profited greatly in shipping, commodities, textiles, real estate, and selling recreational and medicinal opium to the Chinese.

On April 21, 1991, my wife Marcia and I were among the 150 guests President George H. W. Bush invited to the formal dedication service of the newly constructed Interfaith Chapel at Camp David, the presidential retreat.

Two years earlier, I was the only Jewish member of a 15-person committee charged with raising funds to build the chapel and determine its design.

The debate that ensued over the proposed images on the chapel’s 8 stained-glass windows brought to the surface the tension between those who see America as a Christian nation and those who, like me, believe that the Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion and conscience for all its citizens.

Despite the chapel’s official interfaith name and announced purpose, some members insisted that our mission was to create a Christian church.
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What I call “The Battle of Camp David” began when the highly skilled, deeply religious Christian émigré artist, Rudolph Sandon, and his wife, Helen, laid out the initial sketches of their window designs. Six of the 8 contained the denominational logos of major Protestant bodies, including the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the Episcopal Church. The seventh featured a Christian cross representing Roman Catholicism, and the eighth combined symbols of Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism.

April 11, 2021, marks a significant date in the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel: the 60th anniversary of the opening of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961. It coincided with the young Jewish state’s bat/bar mitzvah year of national independence. These two contrasting events represented a microcosm of modern Jewish history.

An obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel, in the dreaded Nazi SS, Eichmann was the chief logistical officer in charge of the mass murder of more than six million Jews during the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust). He escaped from an Allied prison camp after World War II and fled to Argentina, where he assumed a new name and identity.

As a result, he was not among the top Nazi war criminals that the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France placed on trial during the famous Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1945.
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For 15 years, Eichmann’s whereabouts remained elusive, and although he was called the major architect of the ”Final Solution” (the bland Nazi term for the mass murder of the Jewish people), he lived openly with his family near Buenos Aires and worked in a local Mercedes-Benz factory.

Rarely in modern history does a single book change the course of human events. But that is exactly what happened 125 years ago, when in 1896 the Viennese playwright and journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). What makes his improbable achievement – setting the stage for the eventual creation of the State of Israel – all the more fascinating is that Herzl was a thoroughly assimilated Jew.

The story of his transformation into a Jewish national leader and a major player on the global stage of history began a year earlier while he was in Paris covering for the newspaper Neue Freie Presse what became known as l’affaire Dreyfus (the Dreyfus affair).
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Like other progressive thinkers of his time, the thirty-four-year-old Herzl admired France’s revolutionary ideals of liberte, egalite, and fraternite. The arrest, trial, public disgrace, and imprisonment of an innocent French Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, shattered Herzl’s confidence in the ideals and progress of the French Enlightenment.

(RNS) — Black History Month is a fitting moment to recall a brief, remarkable friendship that permanently transformed America.

The extraordinary bond that existed between the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel began in 1963, ending only when King was assassinated in Memphis five years later.
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King was born in 1929 in Atlanta and grew up during the violent Jim Crow era of racial segregation that impacted all aspects of King’s daily life. A third-generation Baptist minister, he received a doctorate at Boston University in 1955. Five years later, King became the co-pastor, with his father, of the prestigious Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

While I was raised in a Jewishly thick family, the Alexandria of my youth was saturated with a Southern Baptist/Confederate ethos, and I was fascinated by both. After all, Alexandria was Robert E. Lee’s hometown. The Baptists were the majority religious group in the city of 30,000, and many of them, including my Boy Scout leader, projected a cavalier attitude they were the true believers and guardians of both God and America.

One unforgettable event of my youth triggered a lifelong question: How could a religion that stressed universal love and God’s “Amazing Grace” vilify and demonize its spiritual and historic parent: my beloved Judaism?
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That decisive episode took place on a hot Saturday night in the early 1950s at an outdoor revival meeting in a huge tent erected about ten miles south of Alexandria on U.S. Route 1. While it was my first revival meeting, it was old stuff to my three high school friends – all evangelical Christians – who had invited me to join them.