Author: Yaakov Menken

The Kiruv Imperative

While Dr. Schick has just contributed a new article, I think his previous one, about Jewish outreach, warrants further analysis and exploration. To an extent kiruv (Jewish outreach) requires a suspension of reality. This...

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Shafran on Grossman

Several weeks ago, I wrote that the Conservative Movement’s Rabbi Susan Grossman had mischaracterized Judaism’s understanding of when life begins, and the Jewish position on abortion, in an opinion piece in the Baltimore Jewish...

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On Dialogue

On a northbound train today, the passenger who sat down next to me turned out to be a Reconstructionist Rabbi, a senior staff member of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation. We shared the opportunity to...

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Wake Up and Smell the Bigotry

Sometimes, we can be our own worst enemies. And at other times, we can help our enemies when they are getting their just desserts — not quite as bad as “our own worst enemies,”...

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Deja Vu

The United States District Attorney for the Southern District of New York is suing the incorporated village of Airmont, NY, for violating the civil rights of Orthodox Jews… again. Back in 1991, the District...

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The Jewish Position?

A note from a reader tells me that I may have been too nice to the Rabbi turned TV Consultant who wrote a letter saying that she, too, was upset with the portrayal of...

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Correcting the Record

A friend and dedicated reader passed along the following, which relates to my earlier comments concerning a Rabbi as TV Consultant: Dear Cleveland Jewish News, I saw the article you ran in today’s paper...

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The Effect of our Environment

A few months ago, my wife and I spent Shabbos in Flatbush (a Brooklyn neighborhood with a large Orthodox community) for the first time in well over a decade. At some point, my wife...

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Rabbi as TV Consultant

Sometimes you get quick answers in CyberSpace, but I didn’t expect Ralphie to be answering my question about Rabbi Shafran’s article, before I’d even published it. [You may need to read my previous posts,...

The Detail Omitted

Once again, something from Toby Katz fits well with a post I was planning to make. She wrote: Nowadays even many of the clergy in the heterodox movements are in the category of “tinok...

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