Articles

Leftists must not cede our redemptive imagination to Jewish and Christian religious fundamentalists. Ancient Jewish wisdom can pave the road to liberationist, ethical models of redemption.

Jenny Labendz is formerly a tenured associate professor of religious studies and currently a JD candidate at Brooklyn Law School. She is the author of Socratic Torah: Non-Jews in Rabbinic Intellectual Culture (Oxford 2013) and Beyond Hope: Rabbinic Eschatology of Late Antiquity in Comparative Perspective (Oxford 2026). She is based in Hoboken, NJ.

A Non-Jewish Reader’s Reflection on the Book of Jonah

What does Unetaneh Tokef, the Yom Kippur prayer that confronts us with our mortality, teach us about being human? And how does its message carry into the rest of the year? 

From childhood fear of the cantor's booming litany of who shall live and who shall die, through the ways that fear breeds selfishness and division, toward an adult reading centered on teshuvah, humility, and repair, Unetaneh Tokef gives us many ways into pondering our mortality. 

The 2026 Recharging Reform Judaism conference adopted a resolution to bar anti-Zionists from ordination at Hebrew Union College, positing Zionism as a defining criterion of Jewish authenticity. This proposal has a long historical context, through which the alignment of Reform Judaism with Zionism was less a democratic development than a forcibly instituted one, advanced over several decades by committees appointed from above and votes taken under limited deliberation. The anti-nationalist position now being derided was a cornerstone of many of the movement's own founders. We must recover an older strand of Reform thought, grounded in a universal ethics of solidarity and the mission to rebuild the world on foundations of social justice.