Category: General

Open and Shut Case

The lady on the Staten Island ferry the other day was clearly grunting for my ears. With my unfashionable beard, dark suit and black hat, tagging me as an Orthodox Jew is pretty much...

Strafing or Sanctions?

There isn’t a sane person on the planet—at least if evil counts as insanity—who doesn’t wish for Iran to be forced to abandon its nuclear ambitions (or to have them vaporized by one or...

Meat and Murder

I have an abiding appreciation of animals. My family has shared living space at one point or another over the years with: a small goat, a large iguana, a beautiful tarantula, an assortment of...

The Gorilla’s Lesson

The little boy was petrified, as one might imagine, by the gorilla who sat down next to him at the table in his (the child’s) home. I hadn’t meant to scare the kid; I...

The Times, It Ain’t A-Changing

I can’t pride myself on having a good long-term memory (as my wife can attest, that’s an understatement), but a February 1 New York Times article did spur my sluggish hippocampus. The Times article...

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Give Gays a Chance

(A slightly edited version of this article appears, under a different title, in the February 24 issue of the Forward) The recent mini-drama of Rabbi Aryeh Ralbag’s suspension as chief rabbi of his native...

Confessions of a Giants Fan

I’m tapping this out in my office at Agudath Israel of America’s national headquarters in Manhattan to the tune, so to speak, of blaring horns, booming drums, and the wild shouting of hundreds of...

Scrapbook Walls

First time visitors to the Shafran home quickly notice how odd it is. Its walls, that is. Well, what graces them, anyway. The dining room does sport a few normal things—a framed reproduction of...

Praying for Contemporary Captives

It was over a decade ago, in the wake of a spate of terrible terrorist attacks on Jews in Eretz Yisrael, that the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah called upon Jews to recite chapters of Tehillim...

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Shark Feeding Frenzy

When my husband was a flight surgeon on the US Air Force base in Guam, he witnessed a feeding frenzy by sharks. Daily, a huge garbage truck would gingerly back up to the edge...

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