Who is a plagiarist?
One story that is sure to grip the Orthodox world in coming months is the civil suit for plagiarism brought against best-selling author Naomi Ragen by Michal Tal. Well-known chareidi writer Sarah Shapiro has...
Category: General
Enhancing SiteRecommender
Fighting web comment spam continues to be a major issue with popular blogs. We installed the ‘akismet’ tool for WordPress on January 2, 2006, and by July 14 it had trapped over 10,000 spams....
A Pesach Thought
A sefer I had not turned to till this year yielded one of the most delectable thoughts on the Hagaddah I’ve seen this season. I happily share it with our readers. The Baal HaHagaddah...
On Shteibels, Internet-Induced Uniformity, and Baltimore
A recent stint as a scholar-in-residence in Baltimore drove home a point that I first learned the hard way decades ago. Shteibelization is not a panacea for unhappy shul-goers. I had not been out...
Means and Ends
by Rabbi Harvey Belovski Much has been written about the predicament of mature singles in our communities, their frustration, sense of helplessness and feeling of exclusion from mainstream Jewish life. However, the religious fallout...
Reciprocity and Specialness
Several readers of my recent post on interfaith conversations raised the issue of reciprocity. If we find that people are ready to listen to us when we share our Torah values and perspectives, is...
Under-Breeding Ourselves Out of Existence: A View From London
by Rabbi Harvey Belovski Growing up in middle-class not-so-frum Jewish London, I noticed that families with more than three children were very rare. In my childhood I knew only two families with four children...
The Wonders of Leaving Observance
An alert reader caught it on Friday, but in case you didn’t get to see it, it was featured on the JPost all weekend: a celebration of the “former haredim who broke out of...
Blood of Life
That a recent book’s reported claim of Jewish ritual murder in the Middle Ages stirred considerably more commotion in the Jewish media than in the Muslim world may be a hopeful sign. Or it...
Of Pizza and Pie Charts
There has been considerable hullabaloo in the Jewish media of late over Jewish demographics, much of it bewildering (and ultimately saddening), some of it strangely invisible. First there was the study claiming that 60%...
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