Spaghetti and Jewish Unity
Last week afforded me an opportunity to sit with a group of Jews spanning the gamut of American Jewry – resolute secularists, members of non-Orthodox congregations and Orthodox Jews – to discuss Jewish unity...
Intermarriage: Just Say “No”, and Mean It!
Intermarriage is probably the reddest line that exists for Orthodox Jews. There are Jews who identify as Orthodox yet are not fully careful about kashrus, about certain aspects of Shabbos observance, and so forth...
Who Will Be the Next President of YU? Placing the Horse Before the Cart
Who will be the next president of Yeshiva University? This seems to be the question of the day, as journalists speculate and suggest all types of names and ideas. The discussion has been brought to our Shabbos table...
The Har Nof Massacre, Knife Attacks, and BDS
Again and again, today’s purported “anti-Israel” demonstrations slip into a familiar and ugly pattern of anti-Semitic bigotry.
Barack is Leaving the Building
Although Barack Obama’s last day in office won’t come until January 20, 2017, the spectacle of the various presidential debates reminds us all that we won’t have him to kick around too much longer....
Abetting Evil on the Temple Mount
An article of mine about the limits of empathy, the historical revisionism of The New York Times and the endangering of Jewish lives by activists intent on establishing a Jewish presence on the Temple...
The Latest in Shabbos Tech
When Ben-Tzion Davis, a Ger Tzedek and self-described electronics nerd, opened a standard Shabbos hotplate to help a friend, he was shocked to discover what was inside. His friend could easily have been more...
Buried Treasure in Tokyo
At a news conference last week, Satoshi Omura, a Japanese researcher and one of three scientists who had just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, made a comment that was not only...
Erev Shabbos in the Throes of Uncertainty
[Harvey Tannenbaum of Efrat not only gets the news out to us junkies faster than the wire services, he often has an angle or two on the human dimension that others miss. He sent...
A Poignant Note From Israel
With all of us having family and friends in Israel, it is not particularly difficult to commiserate with them, to be נושא בעול of our brothers and sisters. With all that we have heard,...