Crime and Capital Punishment
So accustomed are we to incarceration as punishment that it’s easy to forget that punitive confinement is entirely absent from the Jewish mesorah. To be sure, the Torah allows for – and even describes...
Author: Avi Shafran
Of Slums and Slobodka
[PHOTO; Ner Israel Rabbinical College] When my father, a”h, underwent surgery several years ago at Johns Hopkins Hospital in downtown Baltimore, I spent several nights in a nearby apartment, courtesy of a wonderful chessed...
Scrutinizing the Squad
President Trump’s singling out of four progressive freshman Congresswomen – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan – for strong criticism resonated strongly...
Caution: Untruths Ahead
Award-winning investigative reporter Michael Isikoff recently released an in-depth report on the origins of the theory that the July, 2016, murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was a political assassination. In the...
What the Pew Report Got Wrong
An opinion piece I wrote for JTA about a recent Pew report on religious restrictions in countries around the globe, and which had criticism of Israel, can be read here.
Loony Tooner
Cartoons employing anti-Semitic tropes became a thing again last week. The memory of the New York Times International Edition’s offering of a Portuguese cartoonist’s depiction of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog,...
Federation Blues
When a media offering chooses to not identify a quoted speaker, it loses a bit of credibility. But the words attributed to several unnamed Jewish federation leaders in a recent report in the Israeli...
Baffled by Batson
On a summer morning back in 1996, someone entered a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi and shot four people to death. The prime suspect was a man named Curtis Flowers, who had been fired...
Vaccination Proclamation
The threats and vulgarities bellowed by several visibly Orthodox Jews at members of the New York State Assembly in Albany after it narrowly passed a measure ending religious exemptions for immunizations were ugly and...
Love, Hate and the Holocaust
Considering that a survey last year revealed that 31 percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and that 41 percent of...
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