Some law and religion news from around the web this week:
- A New York grand jury indicted a Brooklyn man accused of fatally shooting a Muslim cleric.
- In Washington D.C., religious leaders are uniting to defeat a growing wave of anti-Semitism.
- Anti-Abortion activists in Chicago have filed a lawsuit challenging a city ordinance preventing protesters from getting within eight feet of people entering health care facilities without their consent.
- Bills in Pennsylvania and New York proposing to revive old sex abuse claims against the Church have failed.
- In Mississippi, a man who attempted to join ISIS was sentenced to eight years in prison after renouncing his allegiance to the terrorist group.
- The Canadian Mounted Police Force has decided to allow female officers to wear the hijab while on duty.
- In Libya, individuals give first-hand accounts of life under the rule of ISIS.
- In France, human rights groups asked the Council of State to overturn local ordinances banning the wearing of burkinis.
hroughout the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, when commercial, political and cultural contacts intensified worldwide, politics and religions became ever more entangled. This volume offers a wide range of translated source texts from all over Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, thereby diminishing the difficulty of having to handle the plurality of involved languages and backgrounds. The ways in which the original authors, some prominent and others little known, thought about their own religion, its place in the world and its relation to other religions, allows for much needed insight into the shared and analogous challenges of an age dominated by imperialism and colonialism.
What if the Exodus had never happened? What if the Jews of Spain had not been expelled in 1492? What if Eastern European Jews had never been confined to the Russian Pale of Settlement? What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1939? What if a Jewish state had been established in Uganda instead of Palestine? Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s pioneering anthology examines how these and other counterfactual questions would have affected the course of Jewish history. Featuring essays by sixteen distinguished scholars in the field of Jewish Studies, What Ifs of Jewish History is the first volume to systematically apply counterfactual reasoning to the Jewish past. Written in a variety of narrative styles, ranging from the analytical to the literary, the essays cover three thousand years of dramatic events and invite readers to indulge their imaginations and explore how the course of Jewish history might have been different.