Those Boring Gaza Rockets
We are at war. While I have always shied away from purely political posts on Cross-Currents, wartime has its own exigencies. Some of our readers will be hearing from friends and acquaintances critical of...
Credit Where Due
During the election cycle, many of us, myself included, contrasted Obama’s distance from Israel with Romney’s clear belief in Israel’s right to self-defense and the Palestinian’s lack of interest in true peace. We were...
The Evil Eleventh
Is child abuse “more common in the Orthodox Jewish community than it is elsewhere? There are no reliable statistics … but there’s reason to believe the answer to that question might be yes.” Those...
Staying Still to Serve
By Binyamin Ehrenkranz When He finished speaking with Avraham, G-d left [him]. Avraham then returned to his place. — Gen. 18:33 Frank took me to the Oval Office (my first view of it) ....
Autonomy Über Alles
As with a number of evil ideas, physician assisted suicide can be defended without great difficulty. The magic word for making the case is “autonomy”—the right of individuals to make choices about their future...
Death: A Nice Opportunity for Regret
by Erica Brown THOMAS ARNOLD KEMP was executed this past April through lethal injection. He stole $200 from a college student in Tucson in 1992 and then murdered him. It took seven minutes for...
Rav Shmuel Lazer Stern, Z”L: Tribute to a Friend
Almost from the beginning, people spoke about matzah. Indeed, the special hand shmurah baked each year by Rav Shmuel Lazer Stern z”l might as well have been his signature statement with which he announced...
Shemonah Esrei For The Second Term
No matter how they cast their ballots, many in our community feel confusion, vulnerability and fear in the aftermath of the election. As committed Jews, all feelings of helplessness could and should help our...
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
by Steven Pruzansky The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must...
The Rabbi’s Daughter
I cried watching this film. Not just because it is about three daughters who choose to break with the chinuch they received from their parents, from the ways of the Torah. Not just because...