Personal Invitation to an Orthodox Community Bloc Party
by Shlomie Boehm Our community is being invited to a party. Valuable party favors will be distributed. There is just one caveat — the community must show up en masse, for ten to fifteen...
A Message From R. Yaakov Bender, RY Darchei Torah, Far Rockaway
We have just gone through a difficult few days and I would like to go over two important points: 1. Many people , young and old, are hurting now. They need help in cleaning...
Misguided Markings
In slow but clear Hebrew and with an endearingly wry smile, the elderly Jewish lady recalls a trip to America one summer with her sister. At a bank, she recounts, the teller, a young...
Genesis and the Higgs Boson
by Daniel Korobkin Jews worldwide have just begun again the weekly Torah reading cycle with the book of Genesis and the story of creation. This comes on the heels of this summer’s most important...
We Didn’t Build That
The current extended silly season called a presidential campaign has certainly provided its share of absurdities. Wouldn’t it be nice if all there was to consider were objective facts about the candidates and carefully...
Metzitzah and the Halachic Process
by Rabbi Yerachmiel Seplowitz The Metzitzah controversy is nothing new. In the 1800’s, in Germany, the elements of Reform sought to ban circumcision entirely, attacking the “barbaric” practice of Metzitzah b’peh (MBP), where a...
The Foreign Policy Debate Ahead
Foreign policy has long been considered the one area in which President Obama has a decisive edge over challenger Mitt Romney in the eyes of most voters. Or at least that was the case...
Mrs. Aardvark Comes Home
A time-travelling housefly, transported back to the mid-1980s and spending a Sunday afternoon lazing high on the wall of an ornate living room in a stately home on the fashionable East Side of Providence,...
At the Lemonade Stand
In an opinion piece in the Jewish Week, the three co-authors of the recent study of New York’s Jewish population cheerfully report on why their findings are so promising: Much has been written about...
Accepting Reality: the US Politics Edition
It is interesting to see how far partisans are willing to stretch (or flatly deny) obvious facts. I don’t know what motivates either David Luchins or some of the commenters (notably Charles Hall), but...