Author: Yitzchok Adlerstein

The news got out earlier today that YU’s search committee at arrived at a choice for a successor to President Richard Joel. Rabbi Ari Berman, a former spiritual leader of The Jewish Center in...

Who’s more likely to get us wrong – journalists far removed from our community and its thought, or academic scholars outside their field of competence? The answer should be obvious: a journalist from outside...

“If they understood the effect the chiming of the church bells had on the Jewish soul, they would never stop them.” So observed a Torah sage of a different generation, when the grandeur and...

Pragmatic isolationism vs. an obligation to share the Torah’s vision with non-Jewish Americans. Pose those choices to a group of charedi-identifying yeshiva students who expressed an interest in conservative politics. What would you expect...

I was puzzled by the anguished responses of some of my friends to the videos of children at two Satmar camps being indoctrinated in the fine art of hatred of Zionists. Publicized on Yeshiva...

Tisha B’Av may not be anyone’s favorite, but it may be just what the Good Doctor ordered to treat a very modern malady. Jewish calendar events, we are told[1], are never commemoratives. We don’t...

The Nesivos Shalom in his first piece on the Three Weeks demonstrates how Tisha B’Av is ironically the most important day of the year in rebuilding the Beis HaMikdosh, not just mourning its loss....

When Yair Lapid introduced his measures to nudge the charedi community into the IDF and the work force a few years ago, Cross-Currents readers mixed it up with more gusto than Bernie Sanders supporters...

The death of an old friend always comes hard. The impact is lessened when the march of time long ago sent you in different directions. Why, then, did news of the petirah of Rav...

Listening to the buzz about the conversion kerfuffle last week, one would think that breaking the back of the Israeli rabbinate will becalm the angst of past converts unsure of their status, ensure equitable...