A Few Musings from Vacation
My “vacation” from writing articles about the issues and controversies of the day has been quite refreshing – and quite educational. I think that I have learned or reviewed more life lessons in the...
My “vacation” from writing articles about the issues and controversies of the day has been quite refreshing – and quite educational. I think that I have learned or reviewed more life lessons in the...
You think this is a new problem? Think again. R. Moshe Cheifetz (Venice, late 17th, early 18th century) very often picks up on the juxtaposition of pesukim and phrases that seem to have little...
The image was, to be sure, jarring: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump being draped in a tallis. By an African-American pastor. In a Detroit church. To resounding applause. Bishop Wayne Jackson of the Great...
The news got out earlier today that YU’s search committee at arrived at a choice for a successor to President Richard Joel. Rabbi Ari Berman, a former spiritual leader of The Jewish Center in...
In the span of less than two months, the Jewish people have lost two of its most renowned and articulate Holocaust survivors, Elie Weisel and Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis. Naturally, there is a personal loss...
If the phrase “alt-right” puts you in mind of a computer keyboard, you are (blessedly) not following the presidential campaign. Even if you are aware of the phrase, though, you may not have a...
Who’s more likely to get us wrong – journalists far removed from our community and its thought, or academic scholars outside their field of competence? The answer should be obvious: a journalist from outside...
“If they understood the effect the chiming of the church bells had on the Jewish soul, they would never stop them.” So observed a Torah sage of a different generation, when the grandeur and...
And here, all this time, we thought Auschwitz was a Polish death camp. It was, of course, at least in the sense that it was a place in Poland where upward of a million...
Pragmatic isolationism vs. an obligation to share the Torah’s vision with non-Jewish Americans. Pose those choices to a group of charedi-identifying yeshiva students who expressed an interest in conservative politics. What would you expect...