Who is normal?
How do you say “motherhood and apple pie” in Hebrew? This was an exercise we were given in a translation class. The best idiomatic rendering among the responses was — “Tzionut” in quotation marks...
Klal Perspectives, Vol. 1 Issue 2
With considerable pride and collective exhaustion, the editorial board of Klal Perspectives announces the publication of our second issue, devoted to the changing dynamic within the Orthodox Jewish family. Readers will instantly grasp that...
Titanic II and Yeridos Hadoros
Yeridos Hadoros translates as “the Decline of Generations” Rabbi Benjamin Blech had an interesting piece last week at Aish.com on the Costa Concordia disaster. A few years ago, Rabbi Blech served as the scholar-in-residence...
Scrapbook Walls
First time visitors to the Shafran home quickly notice how odd it is. Its walls, that is. Well, what graces them, anyway. The dining room does sport a few normal things—a framed reproduction of...
Yearnings of the Holy Hedonists
If winter comes, is Pesach far behind? The frost chills us, but the Pesach hotels set out the lures. From the ads, one gathers that it is the “truly frum” who are the targeted...
“There Is No Hatred Like the Hatred of Faith”
The piece that follows is shocking in its smugness, in its arrogance, in its elitism, in its hatred – even for Haaretz. I present it in the entirety, as an aid to understanding what...
Testing Anti-Charedi Sentiment
What happens when two very secular Israeli journalists don charedi garb, and show up in chiloni redoubts? Not very much, and it proves even less. The television journalists decide to test the contention that...
It’s a Strange World
In more ways than one. I somehow missed this item in November when the story was first reported in the press, only to receive it today from a Muslim source. Jews and Muslims here...
Praying for Contemporary Captives
It was over a decade ago, in the wake of a spate of terrible terrorist attacks on Jews in Eretz Yisrael, that the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah called upon Jews to recite chapters of Tehillim...
Welcome Words From a Spiritual Giant
It has been over thirty years since I met Yaakov Katz, and I’ve regretted ever since that I have not had an opportunity to stay in touch with him. Ketzalah, as everyone calls him,...