Author: Avi Shafran

Anti-Milah Activist’s Jewish Problem

Two new twists emerged in the West Coast wars against bris milah, or circumcision, recently. The bid to outlaw the practice in the seaside city of Santa Monica, just north of Los Angeles, was...

What America Gets

Many people seemed happy to treat President Obama’s speeches last month on the Middle East and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s before Congress as some sort of sports tournament, rooting and scoring and declaring winners...

Call Me Informant

I snitched on some fellow Jews not long ago. To a government agency yet. It did leave a strange taste, but I think it was the right thing to do. What prompted my unprecedented...

French Connection

The latest marchers in the long parade of horribles anxious to murder in the name of a religion of peace are two feckless young men, Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, natives of...

The Helicopter Left Behind

I think that now, weeks since the mortal remains of this generation’s most reviled mass-murderer were offered to fish and crustaceans, it’s safe to bring up an important Jewish thought that should have occurred...

Letter to the Editor

How heartening that Mahmoud Abbas declares that the State of Palestine that he hopes for will be a “peace-loving nation.” Now his task is to somehow square that with his embrace of Hamas, solemnly...

Roman Rite Leads to Jewish Thought

Roman Catholic rituals aren’t usually even a small part of my family’s Shabbat table discussions but a recent Sabbath meal was an exception, granted in the spirit of revisiting an ever-timely Jewish concept. The...

A Well-Trained Seal

The article below, reprinted with permission from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, was distributed by that news service to its subscribers. There is something ironic, to put it politely, about an effort championing ethics that...

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