What Could Have Been
Rabbi Gil Student sent me a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal, which discusses the provocative advertising by Sam Harris to sell his book. Gil caught the offensive content before his...
Category: Religion
Of Treifos and Trust
Rabbi Adlerstein’s non-response to the “Monsey chicken story” resulted in the largest comment thread in recent memory — thanks to people responding to the story. Something about fools rushing in comes to mind, but...
This Year’s Lulav Alert
Dear All, I just received a call from the wife of an Israeli lulav importer with whom I am very friendly, and with whom I and Agudath Israel of America have worked closely the...
Asking the Right Questions
The Shofar blasts, writes the Rambam, are meant to awaken us from our slumber. Teru’a reminds us of something being shattered. What is being shattered (or should be)? We are – – as we...
Unclaimed Baggage
In early August, the New York Sun published an editorial about the apparent anti-Israel bias of the group Human Rights Watch (HRW). Among other things, the group’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, accused the Jewish...
First Rabbis Ordained in Germany Since Holocaust
I saw this first the Washington Post, but it’s in the JPost as well: “The first rabbis since the Holocaust were ordained in Germany on Thursday, the latest marker in the gradual return of...
To Save a Life
Today’s Washington Post has the story of Waitstill and Martha Sharp, “only the second and third U.S. citizens named to a [U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum] honor roll of 21,000 ‘righteous’ gentiles, non-Jews who risked...
Regrettably, I Will be Unable to Attend
When I received a FAX this morning about an “Erev Rosh Hashanah Havurah Dinner,” I assumed it was a reader alerting us to the latest evidence of how far our people have wandered. The...
Hillel Halkin and the Drift of Conservative Judaism
Hillel Halkin concludes an interesting memoir of his teenage years in the current Commentary Magazine with a line about his father, who was a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary to the effect (quoting...
A General Theory of Just About Everything
Now that recluse mathematician Grigory Perelman has proven Poincaire’s Conjecture, only a few longstanding conundrums remain to be solved. To name two: Why do Western societies inevitably tend towards appeasement? Why has anti-Semitism migrated...
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