The Jewish Week. (Dec 31, 2014.) One billion dollars lost. With the U.S. economy digging itself out of a deep hole, the $1 billion figure represents the collective revenue loss to Jewish nonprofits from 2007, the start of the Great Recession, to 2012, according to a new study. That’s an 11 percent drop in money…
A Father’s Lectures
This I Believe. Radio presentation on The Bob Edwards Show, June 7, 2013. Also appeared as a chapter of This I Believe: On Fatherhood ed. Dan Gediman, John Gregory, and Mary Jo Gediman. My father wasn’t a spanker, a shouter, a poker, or a grounder. He was a lecturer. When he really got into it,…
The Next Pope and the Jews
First Things. (March 11, 2013.) When the next pope is elected, pronouncements from major Jewish organizations will follow this basic script: Mazel tov. Your recent predecessors did many good things for the Jews; please expand them. Your predecessors also did many bad things for the Jews; please admit this and do better. Mazel tov again,…
Can’t Buy Me Judaism
eJewish Philanthropy. (August 2012.) “The day is not far off,” wrote John Meynard Keynes, “when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation…
Ma’alot Tsedaqah and Ordine Caritatis: Orders of Charitable Priority in Maimonides and Aquinas
Journal of Ecumenical Studies. (Spring 2012.) In the context of works that would become profoundly influential to each scholar’s respective religious tradition, both Moses Maimonides (in his Mishneh Torah) and Thomas Aquinas (in his Summa Theologiae) formulated orders of priority for charitable giving. Similarities and differences between these formulations illuminate broader similarities and differences between Jewish…
The Jews Occupying Wall Street
First Things. (October 14, 2011.) As an angry mob has amassed in New York’s financial district, and countless other cities, promising to “Occupy Wall Street [Or Your Location Here],” I have felt a discomfort that grows more insistent by the day. Not because I am one of the nation’s wealthiest one percent (I am quite…
Seth Chalmer 