Days of Awe
For more than forty years my office was located in Manhattan near City Hall, most of the time at 350 Broadway. One by one, the old office buildings are being vacated, as they are...
Compartment Syndrome
It’s easy for many of us Orthodox Jews to look down our noses on our fellow members of the tribe who express their Jewishness only on the “High Holidays” and yahrtzeits, to consider them...
Two Opportunities for LA Residents
I dislike hawking my own presentations, but I am under pressure from major corporate sponsors. OK. Minor, non-corporate sponsors. But they are nice people. Rabbi Ruvain Wolf figured out that anything a rabbi can...
Asperger, Us, and the Yomim Noraim
The “us” are non-Asperger people. For those who live with Asperger Syndrome (AS), much of life is about navigating the strange rules that we “typicals” impose on them. Understanding how they do it might...
Al Jazeera and the Jews
Even as Al Jazeera America – the new offshoot of the Qatar-based news organization – was making its broadcast debut recently on cable carriers in the United States, its parent organization back on the...
The Lessons of Outremont
I hope every Mishpacha reader read and absorbed last week’s cover story about the public relations efforts of chassidic residents of Montreal’s Outremont district, which had implications for Torah Jews far from Montreal. Outremont’s...
Waters of Unlife
A lengthy piece at the online magazine Tablet describes “new Jewish rituals” that “offer comfort to women who have had abortions.” It begins with the story of a woman who, as a young graduate...
Motivators
The recent “news” story about a bar mitzvah boy in Dallas who celebrated the milestone of obligation to observe the Torah’s laws by entertaining family and guests by dancing on a stage with a...
Angels At The Hollywood Bowl
Stay for the concert; get pshat in a gemara. That’s not what I expected from the Itzhak Perlman / Yitzchok Meir Helfgot performance Tuesday evening at the Hollywood Bowl, but it was the way...