Author: Yitzchok Adlerstein

An earworm is a tune that is so engaging, that it keeps going around your head. You can’t shake it loose, even when you want to. If there is an analogue concerning the seder...

You find yourself standing in a vast convention hall, larger than any you’ve seen before. A cacophony of different languages and dialects pounds at your eardrums, but the sounds are all happy sounds. Multiply...

I’m sharing a letter of mine that Mishpacha published in the current issue. Here is the letter – with minor cosmetic changes to make it even clearer. My letter reacted to a single vignette...

I’m in Detroit, unhappily a not-uninvolved participant in what is going on around me. The situation is somewhere between precaution and panic, the latter averted only because of strong, deliberate action by community rabbonim,...

Every bullet fired at the mosque had at least three names on it: Muslim, Jew, Black. The dark, foreboding world of the far-right, replete with its own vocabulary, video games, and revisionist history, is...

Jean Calas learned the hard way that reading a dubious peshat into a pasuk can be fatal. Mr. Calas, a Protestant, was tortured to death in 1762 on the spurious charge of having murdered...

Unfortunately, so does the road leading in the other direction. A new app has changed the game. This was way too strong an opening for a short piece, but I couldn’t resist. Limmud Torah...

Although I never met him, I thought I understood who he was. At the levayah on Thursday, I learned how wrong I was. I thought I understood him, because his work over the decades...

Reaching out and touching the one of the crematoria doors in Auschwitz-Birkenau a few weeks ago was emotionally jarring. Visiting my mother’s home town of Konstanz, Germany, made it personal. My youngest son and...

A recent comment by one of our readers registered a louder sound to my early-warning system than a stampede through an active minefield. Since the usual first responders did not rush to the scene...