Author: Yitzchok Adlerstein

“This new translation of Tehillim will change your life!” My friend in Johannesburg was exultant. I reacted with the enthusiasm of one who contemplated spending an hour looking over a list of new offerings...

Rabbi Shafran has a good point. The crux of the matter, indeed, is that the two of us, friendship aside, employ very different definitions of anti-Semitism. Rabbi Shafran prefers his definition, he tells us,...

I rarely disagree with my good friend Rabbi Avi Shafran, even privately. Public disagreement between us is rarer then good single malt being left unfinished at a high-end kiddush. Friends, it must be time...

If anyone can add more prose or more tears to the story of Auschwitz, it isn’t me. I’m on my way back from a few days in the Killing Fields, thanks to one of...

You’d think that they were talking about the much-touted red wave of the US elections. In the aftermath of the Beit Shemesh mayoral upset, all sorts of pundits are weighing in about why thousands...

Election Day here in Israel is a legal holiday, which might be a good idea. Because people are in a better mood, the tension and charged atmosphere of intense campaigning is dissipated somewhat by...

A few brief episodes looking back at a long road trip to different parts of the United States. The trip, which forced my wife and I to miss what people widely agree is the...

Two years; two remote outposts. Their impact could not have been more different. Consider this a travelogue with a Rosh Hashanah message. We hadn’t planned to “ascend Hashem’s mountain,” when planning a vacation in...

Unlike others, Steven Weisman isn’t at all puzzled about why American Jews are so liberal. Writing in today’s New York Times (“How America’s Jews Learned to Be Liberal”), his analysis seems, at first glance,...