Spaghetti and Jewish Unity
Last week afforded me an opportunity to sit with a group of Jews spanning the gamut of American Jewry – resolute secularists, members of non-Orthodox congregations and Orthodox Jews – to discuss Jewish unity...
Author: Avi Shafran
Barack is Leaving the Building
Although Barack Obama’s last day in office won’t come until January 20, 2017, the spectacle of the various presidential debates reminds us all that we won’t have him to kick around too much longer....
Abetting Evil on the Temple Mount
An article of mine about the limits of empathy, the historical revisionism of The New York Times and the endangering of Jewish lives by activists intent on establishing a Jewish presence on the Temple...
Buried Treasure in Tokyo
At a news conference last week, Satoshi Omura, a Japanese researcher and one of three scientists who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, made a comment that was not only...
Where “Objective” is Defective
I’m not among those who grow apoplectic at the New York Times’ reportage from Israel. There are, to be sure, occasions when, in misguided attempts to achieve what passes these days for “evenhandedness,” the...
Two-Way Traffic on the Haredi Highway
Have you ever wondered why, in light of the slew of “I survived Orthodoxy but saw the secular light!” essays and books, there no counter-flood of similar writing by some of the many who...
Enjoy!
Each year, sitting in the sukkah on the first night of Sukkos, with my wife and whoever among our children and grandchildren we are fortunate to have with us for Yom Tov, I feel...
Eliyahu’s Double Plea
The Rambam’s logic, as always, is unassailable. Miracles, he informs us (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah, 8:1), simply cannot be bases of belief. What appears to us as miraculous, he explains, could always be trickery or...
The King and Us
One of the findings of a recent Pew Research Center report about Orthodox Jews was that for the vast majority of them – are you sitting down? – “religion is very important in their...
Govrov Selichos, 1939
This time of year in 1939, in a Polish town called Ruzhan, a 14-year-old boy had his plans rudely interrupted. The boy, who, fifteen years later, would become my father, had made preparations to...
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