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...
Category: Judaism
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...
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...
When Tzedek Isn’t: The Conservative Movement Finds a Cause
This article appears in the current issue (Winter 5772) of Dialogue Magazine. When a Jewish religious initiative captures the imagination and garners the admiration of as broad a swath of general and Jewish media...
Unplug Yourself
Could it be that the venerable New York Times actually imitates Mishpacha magazine? Could they possibly be taking their ideas from the Orthodox and using them as their own? Highly unlikely, but the facts...
The Jewish Week and the Modern Orthodox
Those of us who read the Jewish Week of New York are certainly familiar with the controversy that has arisen over Gary Rosenblatt’s article three weeks ago strongly attacking Rabbi Aharon Bina, the Rosh...
Charedi Like Me
Back in 1961, a man named John Howard Griffin, a white native of Mansfield, Texas, published a remarkable book. “Black Like Me” was his account of six weeks of travel by bus across the...
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