The NBA and the Elul Wager
Justice came quickly for NBA veteran referee Tim Donaghy, who pled guilty recently to betting on games at which he officiated and sharing his predictions on the point spread with professional gamblers. Donaghy, who...
Correction Regarding Mendelssohn’s Biur
Rabbi Moshe Kolodny, Archivist for Agudath Israel, alerted me to a dumb error in my piece on Mendelssohn’s Biur. I expressed surprise that R. Akiva Eiger, while voicing other objections to the Biur’s rendition...
Ready for Martyrdom
Today’s Jewish World Review carries an article about Saraa Barhoum, “the young star of Hamas television’s best-known children’s show.” The show is “best known for bringing the world a militant Mickey Mouse look-alike and...
Avarice or Cowardice or ???
The Forward recently reported on another in a series of what it calls “cushy confabs” that bring together the really important Jews to deliberate and pontificate (although the pontiff himself was not invited —...
Lost in Space
Like most religions, Scientism has its articles of faith. Science, the study of nature, has a premise — the scientific method — but no required beliefs about the unseen. Scientism, by contrast — the...
Hashovas Aveidah – Dovid Yisroel HaKohen Botnick
UPDATE: The owner has been located and the item(s) returned. If anyone knows this person, please leave a comment (it won’t be published) or email. He left something in Baltimore. The spelling above is...
Getting to the Soul of L’Affaire Feldman
The last two weeks have provided many venues – in print and online – for valuable discussion and thoughtful responses to Professor Noah Feldman’s article in the New York Times Magazine. I was especially...
Of Concerts and Bans
by Rabbi Dovid Landesman I write this piece with a sense of b’dchilu u’rchimu – let’s translate this as trepidation. When I was younger I was less hesitant about being a semi-m’gadef – ascribing...
Feldman’s Folly (Part One)
If the Orthodox were going to leave him out, then Noah Feldman was going to out the Orthodox. He might just have done us a favor. His thesis was that there was nothing surprising...
Tisha B’Av, Intermarriage & Slippery Slopes
11 b Menahem-Av Formerly Orthodox Professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine , “Orthodox Paradox,” July 22 two days before Tisha B’Av, complains that the Jewish Day School he attended (Maimonides...