Keep the Faith with Shammai Engelmayer

A woman on the Supreme Court? A BLACK woman, no less? Too many people don't think women are qualified to hold any responsible position. Too many others don't think black women especially are so qualified. The Torah has three words for such people: Get over it! Women are men's equals in EVERY way. And ALL people, regardless of any artificial designators meant to keep us apart from ea...

Hand a protestor a bottle of water in Alabama and you can go to jail for "incitement to riot." Deliberately drive your vehicle into a crowd of protestors and "unintentionally" injure one or more of them, and you are free of any liability in Oklahoma. These are two of the ways Republican legislators and governors have created to diminish our right to peacefully protest. Live in...

The FBI says last Shabbat's hostage crisis in Colleyville, Texas, had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. The FBI is wrong. It had everything to do with it, as you will hear. There is a bigger problem, though, with what the FBI said: That kind of denial game by law enforcement agencies  is one of the reasons Jew-hatred is increasingly on the rise here--and it's even worse in the rest of th...

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a good friend of the Jews and of the State of Israel. He saw blacks and Jews as allies, struggling to break the shackles of racism and to help make this world a better one than it is. This is a longer than usual podcast, but there is a lot of history here about anti-Semitism in America from 1776 on, and some of the facts presented may even surprise many people....

Twice this week, abortion either directly (on Monday) or indirectly (today, January 7) is before the Supreme Court. In today's case, it likely will be raised in a COVID-19 vaccine mandate case, with at least two justices arguing--hypocritically--that freedom of religion allows people who oppose abortion on religious grounds to refuse the current vaccines. What the two justices ignore are free...

The title says it all. This episode explains what CRT is, what it is NOT, and how the far right is using it to promote its claim that "the Jews" are out to destroy the white Christians in this country. Support the show

A case argued on Wednesday before the Supreme Court very likely will result in a ruling that could effectively end any notion that a wall exists between church and state. That ruling may also cause great harm to our nation's public school system. It also may highlight the hypocrisy of conservative judges who claim that they are only following what the founders put into the Constitution. In th...

According to Gallup, its current conservative majority has driven the Supreme Court down to its lowest approval rating since Gallup began monitoring this in 2000. Lower federal courts rate better, but not by much, and that too is dropping given some recent rulings. There are many reasons for this—including fears about Roe v Wade and the refusal to delay Texas' anti-abortion law until the cour...

The title says it all. This is a slightly edited version of the original podcast from last year. Happy Secular Sukkot (oops, I meant Thanksgiving). Support the show

The song "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" can apply nowadays to Chanukah, as well. It, too, is beginning to look a lot like Christmas. In trying to fit in with the broader world around us, how far should we go? At the same time, how should we relate to "the other" in a general way? Support the show

When you consider that there are 320 monuments and street names throughout the world memorializing the perpetrators or abettors of the Holocaust, especially including in New York and elsewhere in the United States, as well as in Canada, you must realize that there’s a serious problem that must be addressed. Add to that teachers in a Texas school district being told that under a new state law they...

Tuesday's election demonstrated yet again that the values we Americans should espouse and practice are woefully out of whack. The trivialization of the meaning of Thanksgiving—and with it the meaning of Chanukah and the meaning of Christmas—played a huge role in that. Support the show

A lot of ink and air time has been spent on Alec Baldwin's accidental shooting on a film set, killing its cinematographer and wounding its director. As tragic as that incident was, however, most incidents of gun violence go unreported or under-reported—such as a 21-year-old mother being accidentally shot in the head by her 2-year-old son—and that's an even greater tragedy.  The greatest...

Last Monday was the 25th yahrzeit of the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin 26 years ago. The secular anniversary will be marked on Thursday, November 4.  A religious fanatic named Yigal Amir pulled the trigger. but all of us had a role to play in encouraging him. We still haven't learned that lesson—and that poses a threat to the Jewish future. Support the show

When you consider that there are over 3 million reported incidents of domestic violence every year in the United States, mostly against women, you know we have a problem. Here is the bottom line: spousal abuse of any kind is prohibited by Jewish law. Those authorities who "fuled" that wives may be beaten by their husbands are offering their opinions, often influenced by the broader cultu...

In 2018, the last full year for which statistics are available, nearly 680,000 children were victims of abuse or neglect and nearly 1,770 children died in this country because of that abuse or neglect. Close to 61 percent of these children were victims of neglect, while nearly 11 percent were physically abused, and 7 percent were sexually abused. In fact, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest...

The first 11 chapters of the Nook of Genesis have nothing about Israel or its people. The so-called "origin story of the Jewish people" begins with the origin story of humanity as a whole. There's a lesson in those chapters too many of us humans, Jews included. have yet to learn. Support the show

In too many places in the Jewish world, the likes of the Rev. John Hagee, Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, and a host of others are hailed as friends of the Jews. They are not our friends, and they are not friends of American democracy.  Everyone who is not a right-wing Evangelial Chrostian needs to be afraid of them; be very afraid, We Jews esecially, Here are some reasons why.p Support the show

There are good reasons why the Supreme Court will not uphold Texas' new anyi-abortion law, but the odds are slim. It's all up to how convincing John Roberts can be in arguing with his conservative colleagues. Meanwhile, here is an updated version of Episode No. 18 from July 2020 on Judaism's take. Support the show

Seriously, everyone knows what the High Holy Days are really about, right? Wrong, Listen in and find out why. Support the show

The High Holy Days aren't about our ritual sins, they are all about how we behave towards ourselves, towards others, and even to the so-called lesser life forms and even our environment. There's a helpful checklist to help us make that accounting, which is discussed here. Support the show

Global warming—climate change—is very real, and the early Atlantic and Pacific storm seasons we're having, the massive early and intense wildfires we're seeing, the extreme weather patterns we're experiencing, etc., all are the result. Judaism, based on clack-letter Torah law, has much to say about what we need to do to save our planet. Support the show

Wildfires, tropical storms, climbing COVID rates, an apartment building collapse—things happen that shouldn't have happened, that could have been preventedm but all Congress does, to borrow from what John Adams said in the musical 1776,  is “piddle, twiddle, and resolve. not one damn thing do [they] solve; piddle, twiddle, and resolve. nothing's ever solved ." Support the show

Was the First Temple destroyed on Tishah B'Av? Was it the Babylonians who destroyed it, or was it the Edomites, and when did they destroy it? Should we even have three weeks of mourning leading up to Tishah B'Av, or even nine days? These are all important questions—but the one not to be questioned  is that Tishah B;Av is a day of great tragedies throughout Jewish history, and it is NOT a...

In no other country at no time in history, have we been as free as we are in the United States, and we have broken through virtually every "glass ceiling," able to climb the highest heights. But is there a price we're paying for it—a price we have imposed on ourselves? Support the show