Mere days before I was privileged to participate in a Washington, D.C. symposium on religious freedom in Israel, the Malaysian government threatened to withhold a Catholic newspaper’s publishing permit, to punish it for having...
Married mere days, David found himself seated at the head of a table with his new wife, in-laws and a host of strangers, including some rabbis with long beards. He wasn’t nervous around rabbis;...
In a 1938 essay, Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi, the spiritual and political leader of the Indian independence movement, counseled Jews in Nazi Germany to neither flee nor resist but rather offer themselves up to be...
Winter might conjure pleasant memories of playing in the snow, but it is hardly a season most of us would consider symbolic of childhood. We more naturally associate the “winter of life” with a...
Winter, when my commute home from Manhattan on the Staten Island ferry is shrouded in darkness, provides me a singular opportunity. That’s because the thousands of other commuters sailing along with me are more...
Ever since the Sabbath after Sukkot, when the communal synagogue reading of the Torah began anew, I haven’t been able to attend a Jewish wedding without thinking about the Netziv’s unsettling, if simple, observation....
Two recent letters to the New York Jewish Week criticized opposition by Orthodox groups in America to the possible partitioning of Jerusalem. One called the Orthodox Union’s stance on the issue “a cynical effort...
The Old Gray Lady isn’t cute when she’s angry. Quite the opposite, in fact. The New York Times editorial page’s longstanding antagonism to the Bush Administration is well documented. Still, the only dignified editorial...
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