Trembling Before Rashi
By Shaul Gold One of the defining moments in the development of my hashkafas hachaim (outlook on life) occurred during a Shiur Klali (weekly lecture) I attended as a talmid in Yeshivas Mir Yerushalayim....
Author: Special to Cross-Currents
An Open Letter to Deborah Feldman
by Rabbi Yaakov Rosenblatt Dear Deborah, Your book, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots, touched a lot of nerves and unsettled a lot of hearts in the Orthodox Jewish community. It is...
Return to Basics: A Call to Revitalize R’ Hirsch’s Torah im Derech Eretz
by Daniel Adler [A Young Writer Submission] How is it that over the past few decades, Yeshivos all over the United States have produced students that are “un-Jewish” (to use a Hirschian phrase)? By...
Fighting Yesterday’s Battle – A View from the Beit Shemesh Front Lines
by Dov Krulwich On September 6 I became an activist. Parents at the Orot school in Beit Shemesh were complaining about Chareidi zealots demonstrating against the school, and commenting that their kids were afraid....
A Response to Ami Magazine from Beit Shemesh
by Etana Hecht [Editor’s Note: Contributing to this blog, I know full well that editors must sometimes – often – pull the plug on discussion after fruitful exchange gets to the point of diminishing...
Who’s afraid of Tim Tebow?
by Michael Freund This past Sunday I got a first-hand glimpse of one of the hottest phenomena in American pop culture and sports. The venue was Metlife Stadium in New Jersey, the occasion was...
Whose Problem Is It, Anyway?
by Dovid Kornreich There is a recurrent theme that I’ve read on Jblogs and newspapers, and it has two parts: 1) Chareidi society somehow engenders extremism and these incidents in Beit Shemesh are its...
The Invention of Palestine
by Michael Freund What a remarkable breath of fresh air. For the first time in recent memory, a prominent American politician has had the courage to speak some unvarnished truths about the conflict between...
Naomi Ragen Plagiarism Verdict: Not About “Free Speech”
by William Kolbrener An alert reader, who goes by the moniker “S.” in the comments, pointed out this article, which appeared on the personal blog of Professor William Kolbrener, of the Department of English...
A Lesson in Education
By Karen Greenberg [A Young Writer Submission] When I first decided to become an English major, I didn’t really anticipate any problems that would involve my Judaism. This is not a common choice for...
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