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...
Category: Jewish World
Memories of the Family Dinner
I had not gotten very far in the new issue of Klal Perspectives before being enveloped in warm, fuzzy memories of my childhood. The subject of the issue is changing gender roles in the...
Islamophobia as an Offensive Weapon
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is calling for the dismissal of New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and the appointment of an outside inspector-general to run the police. CAIR and other...
The Super Bowl Maariv
On the morning of the recent Super Bowl football game, a shul in New Jersey sent out this e-mail to its membership: There will be a minyan for Maariv at __________ Synagogue (name deliberately...
An Open Letter to Deborah Feldman
by Rabbi Yaakov Rosenblatt Dear Deborah, Your book, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots, touched a lot of nerves and unsettled a lot of hearts in the Orthodox Jewish community. It is...
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...
Hate Speech at the Forward
Hatred. No, “blind hatred,” a “hatred so visceral that anything the man supports must be bad, wrong, and shot down,” because he’s “anti-American, anti-Semitic, or a baby-killing godless Communist.” It’s an “all-encompassing” hatred. It’s...
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...
The Light of Shabbos, and Shabbos without Lights
At a recent Shabbaton of the Nefesh-Yehudi organization, which does kiruv work on the major campuses in Israel, I attended a presentation on the meaning of Shabbos given by Rabbi Yaakov Estreicher, a dynamic...
My Dirshu Story
Now that it’s “merely” three weeks since their annual Siyum (celebration upon completing a unit of Torah study), I ought to contribute a few words about the Dirshu organization. Dirshu (which is created and...
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