A surprising amount of press leading up to the 10th anniversary commemoration of September 11 has been negative. Among the starker headlines, the Religion News Service released an article suggesting that "Interfaith Understanding Remains Elusive 10 Years After 9/11."

To be sure, last summer's

Contrary to common assumptions, many Jewish and Muslim Americans enjoy warm relations. Yet we are only beginning to understand how and why this is so. A Gallup report released last week goes a long way to explaining this unexpected trend and shows that the two communities have more in common...

Hinduism is hardly new to the United States. Swami Vivekenanda is thought to have first introduced it when he visited as part of the World's Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. He received a standing ovation from the 7,000 people in audience, whom he...

The mass-murder in Oslo last Friday was tragic. At least 90 innocents -- many of them youth -- are already dead, and authorities fear that the death toll may continue rising.

Evidence is mounting that a right-wing extremist, Anders Behring Breivik, carried out the attack at least in part...

It was a moment of crisis for Yeminite Jews. They were being persecuted by extremists of the Zaidi branch of Shiite Islam and forced to convert -- with the explicit threat of death if they refused. Moses Maimonides, a widely respected rabbi in what is now Egypt, responded in the...

Critics of circumcision regularly hurl insults at the ancient practice. Calling circumcision "male genital mutilation" has become trendy, while calling it a "sacred ritual" or citing its likely health benefits has gone out of vogue.

Yet most American Jews and Muslims are circumcised for religious...

New York's interfaith leaders have termed last summer the "Summer of Intolerance." Negative bloggers sparked a heated national debate about a Muslim-run community center in Lower Manhattan that went far beyond laws regarding private property and religious institutions and invoked two intolerable questions: can Muslims truly be American -- and...

In "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," Leo Tolstoy scathingly wrote of a protagonist whose life was "most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Such may also be said of the ruling put forth by Tennessee judge Robert Corlew, who made the unremarkable determination that "Islam is a religion," thereby...

The tenth anniversary of September 11 is in just four months. Plans for commemorative ceremonies, gatherings, and memorial services are underway. But how we understand 9/11 is still far from certain ten years later.

Fears and pain remain; two (or, arguably three) wars are still underway; misconceptions and generalizations about...

Everyone tells me that you can find your "calling" -- the guiding force and vocation that will define your life -- when you sit quietly and really figure out what makes you passionate about life each and every day. But sitting quietly has never been my forte, and introspection is...

A college chaplain once candidly described the process for him, as a Protestant, as one of simultaneous celebration and mourning when he recognized that Protestantism was no longer a universal norm on American university campuses. He celebrated the presence of Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu and humanist chaplains working together so...

I always felt so badly for my Southern and American Baptist friends. They always looked so sheepish when we talked about the Westboro Baptist Church. Could it truly be that "Baptists" started a church which claimed "God Hates Fags" and protested at the funerals of American...

It is a menacing society in which we live today. As we walk through the streets of our cities, we see Jewish people wearing yarmulkes (or not), gay people engaging in conversations with people of the same gender (or not), and Latinos communicating in Spanish or, worse still, the English...

It is a nightmare for an entire religious tradition to be put on the stand as a collective for the actions of an extreme few. It is worse still when the extreme few are such a miniscule fraction of the population. 



In spite of mounting evidence that Muslim Americans...

"My student just sent 500 of his closest friends and me an e-mail that says Obama is a radical Muslim only pretending to be a Christian. He wrote that if Obama becomes president, our country will be run by a terrorist. How should I respond to his e-mail?" This was...

On an ideal Sunday, I get up and quietly make my wife breakfast, so that I can present it to her with great gusto before she's emerged from bed. After dining and doing the dishes, I throw on my gym clothes and go for a run and a lift, as...

The interfaith movement is beginning to rack up successes. While outbursts of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (among other expressions of prejudice against religious communities) are nothing new, the growing and remarkably diverse chorus of voices trying to drown bigots out certainly is.

To take but one recent example, when the

Socially and professionally, we as American Jews have often felt as though we were being 'put on the stand' for our beliefs. Sometimes our beliefs even seemed to be on trial nationally -- notably during the 'Red Scares' leading up to and during the Cold War, when a disproportionate number...

This article was co-authored with Anne C. Epstein, MD, FACP.

Human rights start at home. We must defend them for children in the Jewish community as much as adults in others. Day eight in the life of Jewish boys should be no exception, even as we engage in the ritual...

Judaism is an action-oriented religion. We have, according to the Talmud, 613 Commandments -- not just a top-10 list. In rabbinic courts, your actions can be praised or punished. Faith is a means to achieve just ends, prayer as a way of connecting to the Source of Creation...