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I am a single rabbi without children. I shouldn’t be made to feel I am not ‘doing my part.’
(JTA) — I recently attended a bris in my community where the mohel announced to the new parents and the whole room, “Raising this child is the most important and impactful thing you will ever do.”
These words were offered to anchor the already exhausted and overwhelmed couple in the sanctity of the job they are embarking upon; the holiness of shaping a person into adulthood; the pride in doing something meaningful and lasting.
At the same time, these are the sentiments that form the foundation of parents’ guilt when they have to work or when they choose to be with friends and not their children. They create the basis of self-recrimination when a child struggles and the parent is made to feel they are to blame. They foment anxiety over not enjoying aspects of parenthood or feeling lonely or isolated in the endless exhaustion of rearing children.
These are also the words that shame those of us who have no children.
The year I turned 30, I was not on any identifiable path to parenthood. I was, however, in rabbinical school and deeply committed to the ways I could and would serve the Jewish people as a rabbi. Until rabbinical school, I experienced my own private grief about not having a partner or kids, but no one had ever imposed those feelings on me or pressured me on my timeline.
As part of a counseling course in rabbinical school, I was assigned a reading where I learned that 13.9% of married women ages 30-34 experience infertility (a percentage that only increases after 35). Thirty years later, the author who shared this data did so again at an all-school gathering, reminding us that women pursuing education were largely responsible for the decline in Jewish population, since the ideal age for a woman to get pregnant is 22. He added, in essence, “Don’t come crying to me when you finish your education and realize you missed your window.”
I was shocked by his callousness and also by the overt implication that delaying parenthood for the sake of education was damaging to the Jewish people — an assertion, overt and implied, reached by many Jewish social scientists, as others have pointed out. Apparently, nothing I could do as a rabbi would ever have the same impact on Jewish peoplehood and the Jewish future as producing babies above “replacement level.”
While the presentation surprised me, the idea that the ideal role of anyone with a uterus is to bear children is embedded in our scripture and liturgy. Even the way many of us have chosen to add women into the daily amidah prayer to make it more egalitarian attests to this role: Three times a day we chant, “magen Avraham u’foked Sarah,” that God is the one who shields Abraham and remembers Sarah. This line about remembering Sarah refers to the moment when God undid Sarah’s barrenness, giving her a child (Genesis 21:1). Every time we recite these prayers we are reifying the idea that a woman’s relationship with God is directly linked to her fertility.
According to the medieval sage Maimonides, “Whoever adds even one Jewish soul it is considered as creating an entire world.” How many times do I have to sit on a beit din, or rabbinical court, before the number of conversions I witness adds up to a child? How many weddings and b’nei mitzvah and tot Shabbats and hospital visits and adult education classes? This is math I should not have to do as a rabbi or as a woman. It is not math we should ask of anyone.
I know I am not alone among my peers in expressing frustration around such rhetoric. If we truly believe that a person’s value is derived from being created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of the Divine, then we need to demonstrate this in the ways we speak and teach about parenthood and fertility, celebrating the role and value of an individual within a community with no correlation to the number of children they raise, how they parent, or how those children connect to Judaism.
While there are plenty of sources in Jewish literature and a range of sociological data that offer all kinds of reasons that Jews should “be fruitful and multiply” — often expressed with urgency after the devastation of the Holocaust — the Torah, our most ancient and sacred text, also presents a model for what it means to be a person without a child who makes a tremendous impact on the Jewish future.
According to the most straightforward reading of the Torah, Miriam, the daughter of Yocheved, sister of Aaron and Moses, does not marry and does not bear children. And yet, Miriam played a crucial role in ensuring the possibility of a Jewish future. She was the sister who watched over Moses as he floated in a basket, the girl who connected Moses’ adoptive mother with his birth mother, and the prophet who led the women in joyous dancing when the Israelites finally attained freedom.
In a recent conversation, Rabbi Rachel Zerin of Beth El Temple in West Hartford, Connecticut, pointed out that what is powerful about Miriam is that she appears content with her life. Unlike most of the women we encounter in the Hebrew Bible who do not have children, we never see Miriam praying for a child; she is never described as barren or unfulfilled and yet she is instrumental in securing the Israelites’ — our — freedom.
Through this lens, we can understand that the Torah offers us many models of a relationship to parenthood: Some of us may yearn for it and ultimately find joy in it, some of us may experience ambivalence around bringing children into the world, some of us may encounter endless obstacles to conceive or adopt, some of us may struggle with parenting the children we have, some of us many not want to be parents at all, and some of us may experience all of these at different times.
Like Miriam who fearlessly added her voice to the public conversation, we, too, can add more voices to the conversation about Jewish continuity that counteract the relentless messaging that raising children into Jewish adulthood is the most consequential thing we might do.
Yes, parenting can be miraculous and beautiful, something we should continue to celebrate. But we each have so many gifts to offer the Jewish people — our communities just need to create space for all of us to contribute in a broad variety of ways, by making fewer assumptions and speaking about parenthood with more nuance, expansiveness and compassion.
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The post I am a single rabbi without children. I shouldn’t be made to feel I am not ‘doing my part.’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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University of Michigan in Row Over Professor’s Endorsement of ‘Pro-Palestinian Student Activists’
The University of Michigan Union. Photo: Dominick Sokotoff/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is a house divided after a professor used his commencement speech to praise pro-Hamas activists, dozens of whom participated in a destructive wave of protests that scarred Jewish students and prompted the intervention of the federal government.
“Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza,” university faculty Senate chair Derek Peterson, whose governance position makes him one of the powerful people on campus, said on Saturday.
Hours later, university president Domenico Grasso denounced the remarks for having “deviated” from what Peterson had submitted for review before taking the stage. Expressing regret that Peterson had caused “pain … on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment,” he stated that the Senate chair’s expressed views do not represent the institution’s, and, moreover, violated its commitment to neutrality on divisive political issues.
“Commencement is a time of celebration, recognition, and unity,” Grasso continued. “The chair’s remarks were expected to be congratulatory, not a platform for personal political expression. Introducing such commentary in this setting was inappropriate and did not align with the purpose of the occasion. In the coming weeks, I will work with university leadership to review and refine future commencement programming.”
The matter did not end there. Grasso’s statement rankled the school’s anti-Israel element, and within just over a day some 1,000 professors signed a petition demanding that Grasso retract his commentary and apologize not to any Jewish students who were outraged by the speech but rather to Peterson, whom they thanked “for his care and insight.” Firing off a litany of anti-Israel accusations confected by the Jewish state’s enemies, the petition concluded by turning the table: Grasso, it charged, had violated the university’s commitment to institutional neutrality.
“We can only conclude that there is nothing neutral about the institution’s supposed commitment to institutional neutrality,” the petition stated. “The institution’s supposed principles on diversity of thought and freedom of expression cease to operate when a faculty member expresses a ‘forbidden’ view.”
Peterson responded to this outpouring of support on campus by doubling down.
“It should not be controversial to have one’s ‘heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel’s war in Gaza,’ which is what I credited activists with doing,” Peterson told The Michigan Daily. “Having an open heart to other people’s suffering is a fundamental human virtue, and it is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be.”
For several years, spanning before and after Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Algemeiner has reported daily on campus antisemitism incidents which involved identity-based physical assaults, verbal abuse, and others acts of discrimination.
Committed by the “pro-Palestinian student activists” whom Peterson extolled, they included spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew”; gang assaults at Columbia University’s Butler Library; swastika graffiti; the desecration of Jewish religious symbols; and the expulsion of a sexual assault survivor from a victim support group over her support for Zionism. In another incident, a Cornell University student threatened to murder Jewish men, whom he called pigs, and to rape Jewish women, and perpetrate a mass shooting at the campus’ kosher dining hall.
Professors, while operating largely behind the curtain, assumed roles as purveyors of anti-Jewish content too. At Harvard University, a “Faculty for Palestine” group shared an antisemitic political cartoon which named Jews and Israel as enemies Black and Brown people. At Cornell, a professor said Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, in which the group murdered children and pets while raping both women and men, as “exhilarating.”
On Tuesday, Alyza Lewin president of US affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), told The Algemeiner that “the activists Derek Peterson endorsed are the same students responsible for normalizing a campus climate that equates with evil those who recognize Jewish peoplehood and the Jews’ ancestral connection to the Land of Israel.”
Lewin represents most of the Jewish community and its allies, many of whom have said in recent days that Peterson’s choosing commencement to proclaim solidarity with such a controversial and extremist political movement is indicative of a deeper problem in higher education.
“Protests on campus have repeatedly crossed the line: encampments, disrupted ceremonies, demonstrations at officials’ homes, clashes with police,” Nikki Haley, who previously served as governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement on Tuesday. “The First Amendment must be protected, but it doesn’t absolve any one of consequences. Universities have deep culture problems they must address. If they don’t, they should face repercussions.”
Meanwhile, Ted Deutch, chief executive officer of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), said the “graduation is about more than commencement; it’s about campus culture.”
He continued, “Ensuring that moments like this and the broader campus environment reflect the university’s highest values require clear, consistent leadership from the university’s president and the Board of Regents, and I urge them to lead.”
Commencement speeches are a coveted theater for anti-Zionist activists searching for notoriety ahead of their transition to the real world. More often than not, the performances make them infamous, not least because pulling off the act requires deceiving the professors and administrators who approved their being conferred the high honor of addressing the graduating class.
Last year, New York University withheld the diploma of a Gallatin School of Individualized Study student who “lied” to the administration about the content of his commencement speech to conceal its claim that Israel is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, a falsehood parroted by both jihadist terrorist organizations and neo-Nazis. New York University promptly denounced the student.
Days later at George Washington University, one of its students, Cecilia Culver, not only uttered the same claim but added that her school’s hands are stained with “blood.”
George Washington University noted that Culver had been “dishonest” too and banned her from campus. The university also stripped Culver of her status as a “distinguished scholar.” Culver, whose misstep cost her a job Ernest & Young, is now suing the university for “defamation” and “retaliatory suppression of her protected expression.” The suit adds that her “professional reputation in the economics and policy community in Washington, D.C. and beyond … cannot be remedied.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Tucker Carlson Praises JD Vance, Signals Increasingly Distant Relationship: ‘No One’s Seeking My Counsel’
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Far-right commentator Tucker Carlson is signaling continued personal support for US Vice President JD Vance even as their differences over Israel and Iran come into sharper focus and questions arise about the current status of their relationship, a divide with implications for US national security policy and the future of Republican leadership.
In a new interview with The New York Times, Carlson reaffirmed his support for Vance, reinforcing a longstanding alignment and personal friendship between the two figures. But he also acknowledged that Vance is in a “tough spot” as part of an administration led by President Donald Trump that has taken decisive action, including military strikes, against Iran.
While praising Vance’s character, Carlson suggested that the vice president has been constrained by the limitations of his position. Nonetheless, the podcaster, former Fox News host, and outspoken anti-Israel voice speculated that Vance has tried to redirect the foreign policy objectives of the Trump administration in what he perceives as a more productive direction.
“I know him well and think so much of him as a person. And it is my guess that, based on his past behavior, that he’s doing everything he can to mitigate what he sees as the ill effects of [the Iran war]. But it’s kind of hard to call the shots when you’re vice president, because that’s not in the Constitution,” Carlson said.
Carlson, notably, did not indicate the last time he and the vice president spoke when asked, stoking speculation that the relationship between the two political power brokers has deteriorated.
“Oh, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t want to add to his problems at all,” said the online provocateur, who reportedly played a role in persuading Trump to name Vance as his running mate. “I would just say what’s obvious, which is that I’m hardly an adviser to this administration. And I think it’s also clear that Donald Trump makes these decisions.”
When Carlson was pressed to say the last time he spoke to Vance, he continued to avoid giving a direct answer.
“I don’t know. I mean, I would never characterize that,” he said. “I don’t want to cause him more problems. I would just say I’m not advising. No one’s seeking my counsel. I’m not trying to influence anything. I gave it my best shot. Didn’t work.”
While polling has shown Republicans overwhelmingly supportive of Trump’s military campaign against Iran, the tension between the Trump administration’s approach to Middle East and the Republican base is becoming increasingly central to inter-party discourse.
In the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many younger voters have, according to recent polling, expressed deep skepticism of US military operations abroad and support for certain traditional allies, especially Israel.
Vance rose politically in part on a more restrained foreign policy outlook, skeptical of overseas military engagement. Now, as vice president, he is tied to policies that emphasize confronting Iran’s regional aggression, including support for US actions aimed at degrading Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities and support for terrorist groups.
Carlson, by contrast, has intensified his criticism of such efforts, reflecting an isolationist strand of “America First” thinking that questions US involvement abroad. His rhetoric has raised alarm bells among many Republicans, including pro-Israel advocates, who argue that reducing pressure on Iran risks emboldening a regime that routinely chants “death to America, death to Israel” and has been, according to the US intelligence community, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism for several years.
Carlson has gone further, however, to increase his criticisms of Israel in the two-and-a-half years following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. He has alarmed and mystified establishment conservatives by condemning Israel’s military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide,” and seemingly defending Hamas and Qatar, the terrorist group’s long-time backer. The podcaster has even suggested that Israel oppresses and murders Christians, despite the fact that they enjoy full equal rights and high levels of education in the Jewish state. At the same time, he has noticeably not criticized many Islamic countries for persecuting Christians, failing to acknowledge the oppression of Christians throughout much of Africa and the Middle East.
During the Times interview, Carlson chided US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, accusing the official of engaging in “nonstop treachery” against the vice president in service of advancing his own goals.
“There are people in the White House who want to hurt JD Vance and have wanted that since the very first day. They were bitter. They wanted Marco Rubio to be the choice as vice president,” Carlson said.
Republican leaders including Rubio have pushed back forcefully on the view that the US should take an isolationist approach to foreign policy, maintaining that a strong US posture is indispensable.
Against the backdrop of a shifting ideological landscape within the Republican Party, the Carlson-Vance relationship is becoming a defining lens on the party’s internal debate. Carlson’s personal backing offers Vance credibility with a key segment of the Republican base, but their policy divergence, particularly on Israel, places Vance at the center of a contentious debate regarding the GOP’s future posture toward the closest US ally in the Middle East.
Vance has refused to outright condemn Carlson and, on several occasions, has dismissed concerns about rising antisemitism on the political right, where many young voters have increasingly embraced unfounded conspiracy theories regarding the Jewish state.
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Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges
(JTA) — The man charged with firebombing a Boulder, Colorado, march for Israeli hostages in 2025 will plead guilty to killing one person and attempting to kill others in the incident, according to documents filed in the case over the weekend.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who was arrested at the scene of the June 1, 2025, attack, is asking for his ex-wife and children to be able to remain in the United States as a condition of his guilty plea, according to the documents.
His ex-wife and five children, like him all Egyptian nationals who came to the United States in 2022 via Kuwait, were arrested by immigration authorities shortly after the attack. They were detained until Thursday, when they were released from a detention center in Texas, then briefly detained again on Saturday in Boulder and, their attorneys say, put onto a plane bound for Egypt before being freed once again. His ex-wife, whom he divorced in April, has not been charged with a crime and said she did not know about Soliman’s planned attack.
Soliman is reportedly pleading guilty to all state charges but still faces federal charges in relation to the attack, which he allegedly said he staged to “wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead,” according to an earlier court filing. He has previously pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, for which prosecutors could seek the death penalty.
Thirteen people were physically injured in the attack, which took place on a pedestrian mall in downtown Boulder where supporters of the Israelis then held hostage in Gaza marched weekly. One, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, died weeks later of her injuries.
The post Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges appeared first on The Forward.