A couple of weeks ago, while attending the convention of the Rabbinical Assembly (the professional organization of Conservative rabbis) in Atlanta, I heard Israeli journalist and nascent politician Yair Lapid declare that Israel is the only place in the Western world where Jews are not free to practice their religion as they wish. He was referring to recent events that have resulted from the unseemly alliance of government and right-wing Jewish religious interests: a tourist group of Conservative teens being denied the use of a sefer Torah at a hotel run by a secular kibbutz, the constant police presence and occasional arrest of participants at Women of the Wall’s monthly service at the Kotel / Western Wall.
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