A Kedushah Primer: Response To Readers
Rabbi Safran’s important piece stimulated a flood of comments and responses, the vast majority as of yet unpublished. Most fall into a few discrete categories, and might best be dealt with en masse. Here...
How Dare Reform Rabbis Speak on Behalf of Diaspora Jewry?
He may not have meant it as a threat, but Reform Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, certainly sounded like he was delivering an ultimatum when he warned that if...
Weekly Digest – News and Essays In and Out of Orthodoxy – Parshas Kedoshim 5776
Kohanim May Not Be Permitted to Visit Liberty Science Center This June-January He Was My Father On Losing A Friend Meet the Women Changing the Face of Orthodox Journalism NEW WHITEWASH OF FDR’S FAILURE TO...
Holiness Does Not Have an Expiration Date
A single standard applies. Not just for one time, but for all time. It is not for the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) or anyone else to redefine that standard, for the standard was put in place from the beginning. “You shall be holy for I, the Lord your God, am holy.”
The Soloveitchik Chumash – New Volume Released
With considerable embarrassment I offer this entirely unnecessary review. Unnecessary, because the previous two volumes of the Rav Soloveitchik Chumash were earlier introduced to readers of Cross-Currents. Those two reviews are the two witnesses...
Yisro, Pablo Escobar, and A Coming Wave of New Converts
What do modern-day conversion and Yisro have in common? Not so much, according to the people I know. Records kept over many years by the beis din on which I sit (the RCC, in...
Hubris Heights
Three years ago, geneticists Drs. Stephen Friend, Eric Schadt and Jason Bobe set out to search international databases for people who were over 30 and healthy but who carried mutations that typically cause childhood...
The Last Thing We Need is a Degenerated and Compromised Orthodoxy: A Response to R. Yitz Greenberg
It’s hard to take the article seriously, due to its vast misunderstanding of what Orthodox Judaism should be as well as the article’s quite erroneous general assumptions, but something needs to be said in...
Weekly Digest – News and Essays In and Out of Orthodoxy – Parshas Acharei Mos 5776
Harav Yaakov Thumim, Altshtadter Rav, zt”l Jerusalem Post Editorial: Everyone’s Rabbi CHAMETZ SHEAVAR ALAV HAPESACH: THE SUPERMARKET CONTROVERSY How my grandmother’s chutzpah helped Sugihara rescue thousands of Jews American Jewry Will No Longer Be...
Cheerios Vindicate Ashkenazim!
The custom of avoiding kitniyos (legumes – and others!) on Pesach survived a rocky start, and the smirks of our Sephardic brothers and sisters. Survive it did, and never have so many been so...