A decade ago, an intense debate came to a head within American Modern Orthodoxy over the ordination of female rabbis. Forty years earlier, the same controversy played out within Conservative Judaism, with very different results. The decision to ordain women was championed by Gerson Cohen, an eminent historian of medieval Jewry and then the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary—the movement’s flagship institution. Zvi Leshem examines an unfinished draft of a letter about the controversy composed by Cohen’s main opponent at the time, Rabbi David Weiss Halivni (1927–2022), a highly original talmudist raised in the same Romanian shtetl as Elie Wiesel.

In the letter, Halivni wrote of the dispute, “An emotional frenzy was whipped up against those who stand firm in their opposition [to the ordination of women]. Such individuals have been branded ‘immoral,’ . . . narrow-minded, as possessing a STETL-mentality [sic] and non-native ignorance.” Leshem comments:

The last point—“non-native ignorance”—is deserving of a bit more analysis. As we have pointed out, the strongest opposition to women’s ordination came from the senior faculty members of the Talmud Department. . . . In addition to [the seniormost scholar Saul] Lieberman himself, Professors Halivni, Israel Francus, and Dov Zlotnick were European; Professor Chaim Zalman Dimitrovsky was Israeli; and Professor Jose Faur was from Argentina. All had been yeshiva trained before turning to academic Talmud study. Thus, they were in fact a soft target for the charge of possessing a “shtetl-mentality and non-native ignorance.”

Halivni, turning the tables, views these very qualities as positive in the context of the debate: “We reject with disgust these accusations, proudly proclaiming that we who are clinging to Jewish tradition are the true moralists; that thanks to the stetl and non-native religious and cultural influence the American Jewish scene turned in the last few decades from a spiritual desert into a blooming community.”

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.