The New Jew
No big deal, they said. The new Pew Report offered few surprises. The 2013 report showed an American Jewish community looking like a patient with multiple systems failure; the current report showed vital signs...
Category: General
Parshas Naso- An Opportunity, Not an Ordeal
I cringe when I read someone’s portrayal of the law of Sotah ritual as some sort of “trial by ordeal.” That phrase conjures images like the 17th century Salem witch trials, when Puritans invoked...
From Yom Yerushalayim to Meron
As a woman in a shiur I gave on Shabbos put it, Yom Yerushalayim, sadly, has become the exclusive province of the Dati Leumi community here in Israel. Secular Jews have lost interest; charedim...
Israeli Modern Orthodoxy and Female Clergy – Crossing the Line
The headline caught a huge amount of attention: In Israeli first, woman chosen as sole spiritual leader of Orthodox community. The article, and countless other versions of the same, reports that Rabbanit Shira Marili...
The Highly Educated Hate Us, Too – Maybe More Dangerously
For decades, more education was presumed to be the antidote to anti-Semitism. People with more years of education showed less hostility to Jews in survey after survey. Jews and their non-Jewish allies placed their...
My Father’s Passover and Ours
An essay of mine about what the experiences of two Jews during the Holocaust on Pesach might have to teach us about the present appeared in the Wall Street Journal on erev Shabbos. It...
Why I Am Not Yanky Kanievsky
Silly, you say. I’m not Yanky because my grandfather is not R. Chaim, shlit”a. You’re showing your age. Today, you can be whatever you want, just by identifying. If I wanted to, I should...
British Jews are not silent. No one should be.
[Ed. note: This is an expanded version of an editorial that first appeared in the Intermountain Jewish News] Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, on his last day in office, declared China’s persecution...
The Supreme Court Conversion Ruling Is Something No Orthodox Rabbi Can Support
The Israeli Supreme Court ruling which affirmed citizenship under the Law of Return for those who undergo domestic non-halachic conversions was condemned by Orthodox leadership pretty much across the board, from Tzohar to Agudah...
Lazer in Space
It takes an impressive degree of repugnancy for a Republican lawmaker to evoke condemnation from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Enter newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. She earned that dishonor by...
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