Fear the Frum
Were the New Israel Fund a newly landed Martian’s only source of information about Israel, he’d likely imagine the country as a cross between Saudi Arabia and North Korea. In the extraterrestrial’s mind it...
Category: Religion
Life Beyond Internet
On Monday, Paul Miller, a Senior Editor at a “technology-focused news publication” called The Verge, announced that he was quitting the Internet for a year. He’s switched to a “dumb” phone, and has pledged...
Fourth Generation Software
Having recounted the story in talks and in writing, I apologize if any readers are encountering it here not for the first time. It’s actually my father’s story; in fact, I only heard it...
Identity Theft
Just before Pesach, best-selling novelist Naomi Ragen was socked with the largest plagiarism judgment ever in Israel. District court judge Yosef Shapira ordered her to pay Sarah Shapiro 233,000 shekels for scenes “stolen” from...
America’s Top Fifty Rabbis
If you ever wondered how to judge the success of a rabbi, you know how complex the matter can be. What are the criteria, the measuring rods, by which a rabbi is judged? But...
Open and Shut Case
The lady on the Staten Island ferry the other day was clearly grunting for my ears. With my unfashionable beard, dark suit and black hat, tagging me as an Orthodox Jew is pretty much...
The Powers That Be
This week, I cannot refer to “this week’s reading” and be universally accurate. The Torah portion read this week in Israel is “out of sync” with the rest of the world, a phenomenon that...
True Independence
Rabbi Yaakov of Lissa famously asks in his commentary on the Haggadah, Ma’aseh Nissim: If someone were released from prison and subsequently imprisoned again, would he invite his cell mates to gather with him...
The Pesach Plan
The group of Novardhoker yeshiva bochurim and their rebbe (and his rebbetzin)—along with a number of families—were packed into the train’s stock cars in the summer of 1941. Since Rav Yehudah Leib Nekritz, zt”l,...
The Media’s “Cultural Autism”
The chairman and vice-chairman of Israel’s Media Watch, in a Jerusalem Post Op-Ed, question the failure of Israel’s dominant media outlets to cover “happenings which could appeal to audiences coming from different cultural backgrounds.”...
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