Category: General

Listening to an old recording recently, I was taken aback by a statement in passing by of one of the participants. Kol kevudah bas melech penimah,[1] he opined, meant that women should keep themselves...

A few weeks ago, Rabbi Michael Broyde sent me an article he had written regarding his reaction to a question posed to him during his sabbatical in Israel: “So what do I think of...

by Bracha Poliakoff Since at least the time of Sara Schenirer, there have always been Torah-observant girls and women of all stages of life who struggle to feel connected to their Yiddishkeit, their community...

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...

News broke last week that Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT) refused to ordain an openly gay student. The student, Daniel, declared himself gay late into his first year of YCT’s four-year program. Unfazed by Daniel’s...

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...

My maternal grandfather, who was a prominent pediatrician and radiologist, used to say that “Judaism is the Cadillac of religions.” Although my grandfather’s formal Torah education pretty much ended at his bar mitzvah, he...

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...