A Priest Walks into a Shul…
Have you ever been to a church service? Me neither. Still, I (and perhaps you) have an image of what one is like. And that image, strange as it might seem, is an important...
Author: Avi Shafran
Global Worrying
I think I’ve discovered what makes me so uncomfortable about the assertion that global warming is a real and urgent problem. A front-page New York Times story on May 1 concerned (thanks, Mr. Rumsfeld,...
Measured Insularity Does Not a Monk Make
This article appears in the current issue of the New York Jewish Week and is shared here with that paper’s permission. Haredi Jews have become accustomed to their portrayal in a variety of negative...
Agudath Israel statement on same-sex marriage
In the wake of President Obama’s sharing of his personal feeling that the millennia-old institution of marriage should be redefined in contemporary America, National Jewish Democratic Council chair Marc R. Stanley declared his admiration...
Fear the Frum
Were the New Israel Fund a newly landed Martian’s only source of information about Israel, he’d likely imagine the country as a cross between Saudi Arabia and North Korea. In the extraterrestrial’s mind it...
Fourth Generation Software
Having recounted the story in talks and in writing, I apologize if any readers are encountering it here not for the first time. It’s actually my father’s story; in fact, I only heard it...
Open and Shut Case
The lady on the Staten Island ferry the other day was clearly grunting for my ears. With my unfashionable beard, dark suit and black hat, tagging me as an Orthodox Jew is pretty much...
Suprising… and Not So Much
After a hail of French police gunfire relieved humanity of the noxious presence of Mohamed Merah, the 23-year-old Algerian-Frenchman who murdered seven people, including three children, in cold blood and declared himself ready to...
The Pesach Plan
The group of Novardhoker yeshiva bochurim and their rebbe (and his rebbetzin)—along with a number of families—were packed into the train’s stock cars in the summer of 1941. Since Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l,...
Seizing the Lull
A memory from when I was a teen remains vivid. A middle-aged fellow had come to shul one Thursday morning because he had yahrtzeit. The shul hosted a mixture of Jews, some “frum from...
Recent Comments