Kashering Elephants and Donkeys
I appreciate that my friend of many years Rabbi Menken agrees with me that treating political affiliations like sports teams is wrong, as is attaching ourselves to political positions (or parties, as I wrote...
Category: Judaism
One Man’s Ceiling is Another Man’s Floor
Our self-identification as “conservatives” on a host of issues is not, in actuality, partisan, but the unavoidable consequence of being shomrei Torah U’Mitzvos, Torah-observant.
Death of a Slogan
“Le roi est mort, vive le roi!” That’s the famous French declaration that was traditionally made when a monarch had breathed his last: “The king is dead. Long live the king!” Recent days have...
Name Game
A stylistically different but similar piece to a recent Hamodia one about “Open Orthodoxy”‘s dropping of that self-description, written for the Forward’s readership, can be read here.
The Bond of Shared Targethood
A rumination on black-Jewish relations, born of the recent Charlottesville rally, can be read here.
True Jews
You may know something about the Sicarii, or Sikari’im (or Sikrikim), the radical Jewish faction at the time of the destruction of the Second Beis Hamikdash. What you may not know is that their...
President Trump Is Right, Again
There is hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. It is easy to recognize the hate of 50 years ago; it takes discernment to recognize the hate of today.
Remembering Leonard Fein, a”h
A remembrance of Leonard Fein, who was a dear friend of mine over many years, appears on Tablet, and can be read here
Empowering Ehrlichkeit
If you live in New York City and order a sliced bagel (unlike if you ordered it uncut), you owe sales tax on the item. And if you bought gasoline in New Jersey, you...
Time to Come Home
An article I wrote back in 2001 for Moment Magazine, a Jewish periodical, was not well-received at the time in some circles. Understandably. The article’s thesis was that the Conservative movement’s claim to halachic...
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