Unpublished Heroes
I think it’s time I came clean regarding my doubts about Judaism, about everything I was taught by my parents and rabbaim in yeshiva. How can we be sure that the Torah was really...
Category: Jewish World
Vive la Différence
When MK David Rotem, of the Yisrael Beytenu party, said that the Reform movement is “another Jewish religion,” and then added that the Charedim [which Times of Israel translates as “ultra-Orthodox,” but I have...
Phyllis Chesler Supports W4W?
Women For the Wall seems to have caught a leading member of WOW being too honest once again. Phyllis Chesler was a founder of WOW and now is part of the “Original WOW” that...
Tempest in a Tefillin-Bag?
Of the slew of recent articles celebrating the idea of girls wearing tefillin two were particularly notable. One, because of how revealing it is of its author’s attitude toward halacha; the second, because it...
Unravelling Tefillin-gate
(The subject of this article has been well covered by other writers in this space, and I apologize if posting it here is the equivalent of a fifth wheel on a cart. But I...
The Real Story?
by Steven Pruzansky The controversy du jour deals with the high school girls and their tefillin, and it has prompted the usual litany of responses. Once again, what passes for psak in the Modern...
The Road to Heil
If ever there were a question to inspire ambivalence it might be whether the current push in Israel to outlaw the word “Nazi” and Holocaust-era German symbols is a good idea. On the one...
Obama and the Orthodox, Revisited
In a recent article in HaAretz, reprinted here on Cross-Currents, Rabbi Avi Shafran offered several explanations why there seems to be an Orthodox “animus” against President Obama. He discounts theories like racism and Obama’s...
Aggravated Journalism
Hella Winston was surprised that her name appeared at the bottom of the recent New York Post report about the murder of Brooklyn businessman Menachem Stark, indicating her “additional reporting” to the story. She...
Obama and the (Orthodox) Jews
(The article below appeared earlier this month in Haaretz. I share it here with that paper’s permission.) The gabbai at the shul I usually attend on Shabbos is something of a comedian. When I...
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