Music of the Movement

When Rabbi Maurice Harris set out to write a book about Moses, he never could have imagined where that work would lead.

Now, more than a decade later, Harris is heavily featured in the new Netflix docudrama, Testament: The Story of Moses. The show, which dropped on March 27, is among the streaming platform’s first forays into religion programing. The three-part hybrid-documentary series explores Moses’ story from Jewish, Christian and Muslim perspectives. It intersperses dramatic scenes with actors and interviews with scholars, academics and theologians.

There’s much food for thought in this vital web conversation about how non-Orthodox Jews relate to Israel, featuring Rabbi Deborah Waxman, Ph.D., president and CEO of Reconstructing Judaism. The program was organized by SAPIR, the influential journal of ideas for the Jewish future which recently launched an in-house institute to bring ideas to fruition. Waxman was in conversation with Channan Weissman director of the New SAPIR Institute, a former State Department official and White House liaison to the Jewish community.

For many years, Ruth Wenger, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, shared her love of learning and passion for Judaism by teaching religious school at Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, in Evanston, Ill. One weekend, Wenger — a lawyer, philanthropist and Jewish communal leader who helps leads a weekly minyan at the congregation — came home from class […]