Kerry, Halachic Israel, and Safety
By Rabbi Yair Hoffman for 5TJT.com In the past few months, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has occupied entire floors of hotels in Jerusalem. In early March, Mr Kerry is expected to...
Category: Jewish World
Stopping the Madness
By Rabbi Yair Hoffman for 5tjt.com Let’s picture the true story of a wonderful Bais Yaakov girl in high school. She has friends, she loves her Torah classes. She does well in Limudei Chol....
Unpublished Heroes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...
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...
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