Looking for Win-Win
Eight or nine years ago, I received a visit from a kollel student in his late ’20s. The young manyoung man in question had been one of the outstanding students in one of Israel’s...
Category: Jewish World
A New Coalition for Israel: It’s Not Just About Us
Over fifty years ago, I was playing checkers with my father, a”h, on a Sunday morning. The next oldest brother in our family line-up, not yet five years old, sat on my father’s lap....
Global Worrying
I think I’ve discovered what makes me so uncomfortable about the assertion that global warming is a real and urgent problem. A front-page New York Times story on May 1 concerned (thanks, Mr. Rumsfeld,...
Open Mouths and Open Mikes
The power of human speech made the headlines once again this month — even before the WikiLeak shocks had worn off — with two gaffes by prominent American politicians. One of Mitt Romney’s top...
Measured Insularity Does Not a Monk Make
This article appears in the current issue of the New York Jewish Week and is shared here with that paper’s permission. Haredi Jews have become accustomed to their portrayal in a variety of negative...
Agudath Israel statement on same-sex marriage
In the wake of President Obama’s sharing of his personal feeling that the millennia-old institution of marriage should be redefined in contemporary America, National Jewish Democratic Council chair Marc R. Stanley declared his admiration...
Fear the Frum
Were the New Israel Fund a newly landed Martian’s only source of information about Israel, he’d likely imagine the country as a cross between Saudi Arabia and North Korea. In the extraterrestrial’s mind it...
Fourth Generation Software
Having recounted the story in talks and in writing, I apologize if any readers are encountering it here not for the first time. It’s actually my father’s story; in fact, I only heard it...
Identity Theft
Just before Pesach, best-selling novelist Naomi Ragen was socked with the largest plagiarism judgment ever in Israel. District court judge Yosef Shapira ordered her to pay Sarah Shapiro 233,000 shekels for scenes “stolen” from...
America’s Top Fifty Rabbis
If you ever wondered how to judge the success of a rabbi, you know how complex the matter can be. What are the criteria, the measuring rods, by which a rabbi is judged? But...
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