This is my latest piece, published in the Daily Beast’s Open Zion blog.
Much has been made of the choice of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik as the invocation speaker at the opening of today’s Republican National convention. In part this is because Meir Soloveichik is the scion of a storied rabbinic family whose patriarch, a student of Rabbi Elijah Gaon of Vilna, established one of the great Lithunian Yeshivot in Brisk (Brest-Litovsk) in the eighteenth century. The unbroken continuity of that rabbinic line yielded one of the greatest rabbis, talmudists and Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century—Rabbi Joseph Baer Soloveitchik, known to his students as “the Rov” or simply the Rabbi.
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Being a Republican is different from reworking Jewish theology to support Republican ideas. The speech at this convention sounds to me as a sophisticated concatenation of right wing buzz words. But what is really needed is a close reading of his articles.