Category: General

A few months ago, my wife and I spent Shabbos in Flatbush (a Brooklyn neighborhood with a large Orthodox community) for the first time in well over a decade. At some point, my wife...

My friend Shira Schmidt’s May 18 post about an English barrister who made derogatory comments about Moslems at a dinner party provoked a great deal of comment. Notably absent, however, was much curiosity about...

If you would like to read a glowing description of the haredi sector in the U.S. and the Agudath Israel of America, to the detriment of that sector in Eretz Israel, read the op-ed...

Sometimes you get quick answers in CyberSpace, but I didn’t expect Ralphie to be answering my question about Rabbi Shafran’s article, before I’d even published it. [You may need to read my previous posts,...

Once again, something from Toby Katz fits well with a post I was planning to make. She wrote: Nowadays even many of the clergy in the heterodox movements are in the category of “tinok...

In my recent “empathy” post, I wrote: The notion that only blacks can understand blacks, only women can understand women, and so on, undercuts the bedrock of our common humanity. In a previous post,...

by Avi Shafran, via Am Echad Resources I don’t own a television and so have never seen an episode of the popular program “Grey’s Anatomy,” which has been described as a contemporary, R-rated soap...

What does an MP3 player have to do with my esteemed fellow bloggers? Not much, perhaps, but I can attempt to explain the stream of thought that led to this post. Recently, I was...

I would like to second what Eytan Kobre wrote so movingly in his post “As Thyself” : There is a Jewish angle to this topic as well; specifically, regarding the tendency of some in...

The other day, the local public radio station aired an interview with the author of a book about the talented American musician Bruce Springsteen. Mr. Springsteen is renowned, it seems, for his ability to...