Rabbi Daniel Brenner

Lynching Haman Strange fruitspoon dollopedinto the floury centerof this soon to be folded over cookie. Your ears,We rip from the side of your head and chew,Tyson-Holyfield ritually re-ineacted. There are songs about the hatyou once purchased from Shushan’s finest haberdasheryIf it didn’t have three corners, would you have, indeed, chosen more of a beret? We erase your name from our files.Delete.We shout it down.We write it in chalk on the bottom of our Florsheim’s and we stomp.It is great fun….

Read More Read More

Konee-chee-wah!!!!!!!!!!!! Next Friday morning, the State Department is sending over thirty Shinto priests from Japan. Few of them speak English – so I think I’ll do a few chassidic stories for them and teach a niggun. I’ll bring my digital recorder. Wish me luck. More later.

The New York Daily News has got another strong piece on the immigration bill. From the piece: Tancredo is mad. And his rage is truly ecumenical. He is equally angry at the Catholic, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran, United Methodist and Presbyterian churches, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. For the Colorado politician, these religious groups, by trying to inject desperately needed compassion and common sense into the immigration debate, are putting national security at risk. But the fact is that for…

Read More Read More

Lisa and I were at a show last night – the Kretakor Theatre of Budapest’s rendition of Chekov’s The Seagull (3.5 hrs, in Hungarian) and we ran into Pearl Gluck. Pearl, who spends alot of time in Jersey now that she teaches at Rutgers, informs me that my dreams of being a movie star have been realized. I have a cameo in the DVD special features of her film Divan. Now I can move into a run down mansion on…

Read More Read More

Nineteen years ago, inspired by the words of the Western Shoshone tribal chief, I trespassed onto the Nevada Nuclear Test Site and found myself in handcuffs. I was a college student in need of a haircut in the hands of a Nevada police officer with a buzz cut who escorted me to a makeshift stockade topped with barbed wire, then to a prison bus, then to a town jail in Tonopah. Rather than book me, he took off my cuffs,…

Read More Read More

When I got started on Reb Blog, I basically thought of it as a good way to post articles in print media that I published, or got quoted in, or speeches that I gave up for public viewing in an ongoing way. It would be a vanity press-like journal of my work. Now I’m beginning to think differently about what a Blog is for. A few years ago, I got to meet Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism prfoessor who had…

Read More Read More

Last Thursday night I flew up to Toronto and delivered a speech to about 85 teachers at a symposium on ‘Popular Culture and the Holocaust.’ My address, titled The New Killing Fields: Video Games, Comic Books, and the Holocaust is accesible by clicking here. (too long for the blog!) There were teachers from quite a few Catholic and other Christian schools, Jewish day schools, and public schools. For a vast majority of them this was there first experience with ‘historical’…

Read More Read More

Check out The New York Daily News – a forceful commentary by Albor Ruiz on the immigration legislation that is headed to the U.S. Senate. From the piece: “The Senate will discuss the bill this month, and hopefully smarter, cooler heads will prevail and reject it. This is an unbelievably bad piece of legislation that, despite the hype, does nothing to make the country safer or to fix the broken immigration system.“We have come to a point where we allowed…

Read More Read More

I just recieved a letter from a woman who works with the Liberal Jewish community in Edinborough – and she sent me her speech at the World Disarmament Campaign. She deploys the kaddish translation I penned a few years back in a lovely way. Talk given at the World Disarmament Campaign interfaith occasion 29 Jan 2006, on behalf of ELJC.This is the first time Judaism has been represented by our community at this annual event. Other faiths represented were Christianity,…

Read More Read More