George Altshuler

Like being hit in the head after one is already concussed, Trump’s ascent is a painful reminder of something we already knew: mainstream American masculinity can bring out the worst aspects of human nature. It is easy to list the wrongs that have been associated with various forms of American masculinity — from the role…

When I tell the story of what brought me to rabbinical school, my story comes out differently every time, but I always mention a crucial moment — reading Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in a coffee shop in San Francisco after I graduated from college. From a young age, I had experienced what Heschel describes in…

Why it’s worth pushing back against the insistence on storytelling that’s present in This American Life and other Brooklyn-created media.

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When I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime, I learned many things. The most important thing that I learned under those tragic circumstances was that bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem…

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This is a post I wrote for the blog of the Pardes Institute For Jewish Studies, where I studied this summer.   My father is Jewish, but my mother isn’t. A literal reading of halakha, or Jewish law, would suggest that I’m not Jewish. But my mother and father made a decision before I was born to…

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