S. Brent Plate is a professor of religious studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He has written about religion, art and visual culture. Religions, he notes, discuss the creation of the world, and films work on re-creating the world. He’s interested in how film has “come down” off the screen and infiltrated rituals. His […]

Eric Michael Mazur is a religion professor at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, where he teaches courses on religion and popular culture and Judaism and film. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Film. He is also co-editor of Religion and Outer Space, a volume exploring religion in and on the final […]

John Lyden became editor of the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Journal of Religion and Film in 2011. He was professor of religion at Dana College from 1991-2010 and is now director of the Liberal Arts Core at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. Lyden is the author of Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals and editor of The Routledge Companion […]

Read an August 2010 study by the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University about how American Jews feel about Israel.

Rabbi Deborah Brin and the Nahalat Shalom Jewish community are involved in peace and reconciliation work in Albuquerque, N.M.

Rabbi James L. Mirel is chair of the Washington Coalition of Rabbis. He co-authored, with local Muslim and Christian leaders, a Seattle Times column urging moderate Jews, Christians and Muslims to persuade the American government to engage actively in pursuing peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He is rabbi of Temple B’nai Torah (Reform) in Bellevue, Wash.

Rabbi Herbert Bronstein is senior scholar at North Shore Congregation Israel, a metropolitan Chicago congregation where he was senior rabbi for some 25 years. He teaches at the religion department at Lake Forest College, is nationally active in the interfaith community and formerly served on the board of the Council for a Parliament of the […]

Hands of Peace is a summer program in Glenview, Ill., that brings youth from all sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict together with American kids from Christian, Islamic and Jewish homes. The Middle Eastern teens receive year-round support to maintain connections when they return home. A trio of congregations (Jewish, Muslim and Christian) founded the camp, which […]

Richard Friedman, executive director of the Birmingham, Ala., Jewish Federation, can discuss whether the connection to Israel is in any way unique for Jews in the Deep South.