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...
Category: Religion
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...
Open Season on Charedim — and Torah
One hopes that readers here are not part of the population that peruses tabloids like the New York Post. If they were, though, they would have seen a recent opinion piece that called Jews...
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...
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...
Reb Lazer Elya’s Eyes
Reb Lazer Elya Der Melamed (“the cheder teacher”) was born in the late 1850s, lived in Ostrolenka, Poland, and died shortly before the Germans invaded in 1939. I arrived in this world about a...
The Volume That Speaks Volumes
What could be the connection between intensified Israeli media incitement against haredim and the appearance of a new Yom-tov prayerbook designed exclusively for Israeli Jews? On the surface, none. But let’s glance beneath the...
Who’s afraid of Tim Tebow?
by Michael Freund This past Sunday I got a first-hand glimpse of one of the hottest phenomena in American pop culture and sports. The venue was Metlife Stadium in New Jersey, the occasion was...
Blind Faith and Physics
A recent essay by an award-winning scientist presents a remarkable, and remarkably revealing, picture of current scientific thought about the nature of the universe. The delightfully named Alan P. Lightman, an MIT professor a...
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