No, Mormons are not Jews, and according to some Mormons, they are not Christians either.I want to be on record about this. I’m about as genuine a Mormon as you’ll find — a templegoer with a Utah pedigree and an administrative position in a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am also emphatically not a Christian.There is more. Read the article.
For the curious, the dispute can be reduced to Jesus. Mormons assert that because they believe Jesus is divine, they are Christians by default. Christians respond that because Mormons don’t believe — in accordance with the Nicene Creed promulgated in the fourth century — that Jesus is also the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Jesus that Mormons have in mind is someone else altogether. The Mormon reaction is incredulity. The Christian retort is exasperation. Rinse and repeat.
I am confident that I am not the only person — Mormon or Christian — who has had enough of the acrimonious niggling from both sides over the nature of the trinity, the authority of the creeds, the significance of grace and works, the union of Christ’s divinity and humanity, and the real color of God’s underwear. I’m perfectly happy not being a Christian. My Mormon fellows, most of whom will argue earnestly for their Christian legitimacy, will scream bloody murder that I don’t represent them. I don’t. They don’t represent me, either.
No, the Times reports that according to a new population study of the metropolitan area, the Jews of New Jersey do not count as Jews. 
We just got the cuter little sister (10.1 x 7.5 x 1.7 inches) black and white edition of the Koren Talmud Bavli Berakhot and it is labelled "Daf Yomi Edition."
No, philosophy is not Jewish. Philosophy originated in ancient pagan Greece. The practice of philosophy is not at all Jewish. In fact we believe philosophy is antithetical to both biblical and Talmudic modes of thought.
. If you haven't bought a copy yet, do so today.A KERFUFFLE has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.Our dad understood that you must respect the scientist of cosmology and offer to engage him in dialog. That is what he does in his brilliant book.
This is hardly the first occasion on which physicists have made disobliging comments about philosophy. Last year at a Google “Zeitgeist conference” in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was “dead.” Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy “murky and inconsequential” and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that “philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.”...
" he proclaims his opinions as existentialist philosophical postulates. We've read a new edition of the essay with an introduction by Reuven Ziegler, The Lonely Man of Faith (Maggid Books, Koren Publishers 2012).
Please tell us what to make of this.
Forty five years ago in 1967 we first met the Steinsaltz edition of the Berakhot in Hebrew. Twenty one years ago in 1991, we met the first English edition of some volumes of the Steinsaltz Talmud from Random House. At some intervening points we met the actual Rabbi Steinsaltz. One time we had him visit the University of Minnesota and speak with our students. A very few attended. He was charming to them in his own way.
