Category: General

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, internist 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,...

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...

I wish I had more time to write, but BH I was able squeeze out a bit of time to put these together: The Mishkan: Surprises of the Chatzer – Published a few weeks...

The issues confronting the Orthodox community of today, as novel as they seem, are in large measure reruns of the same issues half a century ago. And those same issues were reruns of the...

Rabbi Yitzchak Blau just posted a strident critique of my writings about Open Orthodoxy. I had not written about Open Orthodoxy for quite a while, and even when doing so, my articles on the...

Jean Calas learned the hard way that reading a dubious peshat into a pasuk can be fatal. Mr. Calas, a Protestant, was tortured to death in 1762 on the spurious charge of having murdered...

Unfortunately, so does the road leading in the other direction. A new app has changed the game. This was way too strong an opening for a short piece, but I couldn’t resist. Limmud Torah...