Bruce Ginsburg, at The Blogs

Bruce Ginsburg

Aug 30, 2024, 7:24 PM

Believing that every phrase in the Torah has a unique meaning, the rabbis of old were troubled by the apparent redundancy in a verse from this week’s Torah portion. Deuteronomy 12:10 promises the desert generation of Israelites that "you...

Mar 22, 2024, 9:29 AM

What It Takes To Defeat Evil

Purim and Passover – which will be observed this year on March 23-4 and April 22-30 -- celebrate our ancestors’ victories in wars of annihilation against us. The biblical sources for these holidays – the Books of Esther and...

Nov 5, 2023, 7:35 AM

The American Jewish establishment’s Islamophobia blunder

A couple weeks ago, I challenged the wisdom of the American Jewish establishment in choosing to issue a statement against Islamophobia in the aftermath of Joseph Czuba’s erratic murder of a Palestinian 6-year-old in Chicago rather than one condemning...

Oct 22, 2023, 7:47 PM

The American Jewish Preoccupation with Islamophobia

This past week, 155 American Jewish Organizations signed a statement decrying Islamophobia, issued in the wake of the tragic murder of a Palestinian child in Chicago by his family’s landlord, Joseph Czuba. I might have thought differently about it...

Oct 16, 2023, 4:18 PM

On American Jewish hand-wringing over Gaza

Following are excerpts from a WhatsApp message I received from a family member (let’s call her “Miriam Cohen”) who resides in the United States: “Please explain to me how obliterating Gaza helps Israel. If we are horrified by what Hamas...

About Me

Rabbi Bruce Ginsburg is the Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Sons of Israel in Woodmere, NY. A product of Boston University, New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary, and Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, he holds a doctorate in Hebrew literature. Known for his decades-old activism on behalf of Israel, Soviet Jewry, and intra/interfaith cooperation, he has served both as president of the Long Island Board of Rabbis and as president of the Union for Traditional Judaism. His essays have appeared in Newsday, the Christian Science Monitor, the Jerusalem Report, and other publications. He and his wife, Rachel, moved to Israel in the summer of 2022.