Give Gays a Chance
(A slightly edited version of this article appears, under a different title, in the February 24 issue of the Forward) The recent mini-drama of Rabbi Aryeh Ralbag’s suspension as chief rabbi of his native...
Author: Avi Shafran
Confessions of a Giants Fan
I’m tapping this out in my office at Agudath Israel of America’s national headquarters in Manhattan to the tune, so to speak, of blaring horns, booming drums, and the wild shouting of hundreds of...
When Tzedek Isn’t: The Conservative Movement Finds a Cause
This article appears in the current issue (Winter 5772) of Dialogue Magazine. When a Jewish religious initiative captures the imagination and garners the admiration of as broad a swath of general and Jewish media...
Charedi Like Me
Back in 1961, a man named John Howard Griffin, a white native of Mansfield, Texas, published a remarkable book. “Black Like Me” was his account of six weeks of travel by bus across the...
Open Season on Charedim — and Torah
One hopes that readers here are not part of the population that peruses tabloids like the New York Post. If they were, though, they would have seen a recent opinion piece that called Jews...
Scrapbook Walls
First time visitors to the Shafran home quickly notice how odd it is. Its walls, that is. Well, what graces them, anyway. The dining room does sport a few normal things—a framed reproduction of...
Praying for Contemporary Captives
It was over a decade ago, in the wake of a spate of terrible terrorist attacks on Jews in Eretz Yisrael, that the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah called upon Jews to recite chapters of Tehillim...
Reb Lazer Elya’s Eyes
Reb Lazer Elya Der Melamed (“the cheder teacher”) was born in the late 1850s, lived in Ostrolenka, Poland, and died shortly before the Germans invaded in 1939. I arrived in this world about a...
Blind Faith and Physics
A recent essay by an award-winning scientist presents a remarkable, and remarkably revealing, picture of current scientific thought about the nature of the universe. The delightfully named Alan P. Lightman, an MIT professor a...
Pilloried With Hillary
One of the many downsides of a world that moves as quickly as ours is that many of us feel we must react to events in “real time” rather than after some research and...
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