Who is normal?
How do you say “motherhood and apple pie” in Hebrew? This was an exercise we were given in a translation class. The best idiomatic rendering among the responses was — “Tzionut” in quotation marks...
Category: Judaism
Titanic II and Yeridos Hadoros
Yeridos Hadoros translates as “the Decline of Generations” Rabbi Benjamin Blech had an interesting piece last week at Aish.com on the Costa Concordia disaster. A few years ago, Rabbi Blech served as the scholar-in-residence...
Scrapbook Walls
First time visitors to the Shafran home quickly notice how odd it is. Its walls, that is. Well, what graces them, anyway. The dining room does sport a few normal things—a framed reproduction of...
Yearnings of the Holy Hedonists
If winter comes, is Pesach far behind? The frost chills us, but the Pesach hotels set out the lures. From the ads, one gathers that it is the “truly frum” who are the targeted...
“There Is No Hatred Like the Hatred of Faith”
The piece that follows is shocking in its smugness, in its arrogance, in its elitism, in its hatred – even for Haaretz. I present it in the entirety, as an aid to understanding what...
Praying for Contemporary Captives
It was over a decade ago, in the wake of a spate of terrible terrorist attacks on Jews in Eretz Yisrael, that the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah called upon Jews to recite chapters of Tehillim...
Welcome Words From a Spiritual Giant
It has been over thirty years since I met Yaakov Katz, and I’ve regretted ever since that I have not had an opportunity to stay in touch with him. Ketzalah, as everyone calls him,...
Shark Feeding Frenzy
When my husband was a flight surgeon on the US Air Force base in Guam, he witnessed a feeding frenzy by sharks. Daily, a huge garbage truck would gingerly back up to the edge...
Fighting Yesterday’s Battle – A View from the Beit Shemesh Front Lines
by Dov Krulwich On September 6 I became an activist. Parents at the Orot school in Beit Shemesh were complaining about Chareidi zealots demonstrating against the school, and commenting that their kids were afraid....
Gingrich Schools the Media — and we would do well to listen
Jonathan Rosenblum’s article on media manipulation was written before Newt Gingrich stared down CNN’s John King last night. Gingrich received not one, but two standing ovations for denouncing the media’s descent into smear campaigns...
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