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Author: Daniel Brenner

What We Brought Back

What We Brought Back

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“The most surprising aspect of “What We Brought Back: Jewish Life After Birthright,” a collection of essays, poems and images by more than 24 Birthright travelers to Israel, is just how varied and deep the authors delve. You’d be forgiven for assuming this anthology would trumpet the horn of the Taglit-Birthright program, much like the standard mission trip to Israel; this would be a false assumption. The thoughtful musings by the many young contributors to the book, edited by Wayne…

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Becoming a Man

Becoming a Man

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What Does “Today I Am a Man” Mean Today? Published on RitualWell www.ritualwell.org By Rabbi Daniel Brenner In the 1990s, when my beloved was dissertating about race in American theater, I was introduced to a theory on Jewish masculinity from the late Berkeley professor Michael Rogin. His argument, in sum, was that the large Eastern European immigrant generation of Jewish men looked to two different models of men to determine how to “be a man” in America. The first model…

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This is Your Brain on Rabbi School

This is Your Brain on Rabbi School

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This is Your Brain on Rabbi School: A Cartoon Collection By Daniel Brenner I really should have been paying more attention during rabbinical school. Instead, I was spinning ideas into wacky cartoons in my notebook. The cartoons here are the ones that I saved by cutting them out and putting them in a folder. When I got my first job in New York City (about twenty years ago!) I threw all my folders into a cardboard box and shoved it into…

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Biography of Rabbi Daniel Brenner

Biography of Rabbi Daniel Brenner

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Rabbi Daniel Brenner   Daniel S. Brenner was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. He received a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, studied in Jerusalem at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, and earned both an M.A. and rabbinic title from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. After rabbinical school, Brenner continued his studies with the Modern Orthodox theologian Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and went on to serve on the faculty of CLAL- The National Jewish Center for Learning and…

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Explaining Reconstructionism – Chelm Style

Explaining Reconstructionism – Chelm Style

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By Rabbi Daniel S. Brenner Chelm’s rabbi, Reb Dovid, was not a tall man. To reach the top row of his bookshelf, he had to stand on a crate, and on top of the crate he had to put another crate. One morning, as he was deep into his studies, he went reaching for a book on the top shelf to look up a word in his dictionary, and “Crash!” He flew off the crates and landed head first on…

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