The Face of Apartheid Israel
This picture says so much about those racist Israelis. It proves that Israel is an apartheid state. Immanuel had been entombed in a concrete coffin for nine days. A victim of the Haiti earthquake,...
Handwriting Analysis: Science or Snow Job?
As a boy growing up in the 1960s, I became intrigued with handwriting analysis. It’s an intriguing notion, an almost obvious one: our character traits are subtly expressed in our handwriting. Every person is...
Another Breach in the Wall
For a number of years, in my role as Agudath Israel of America’s media liaison, I attended an annual gathering, each year in a different city, of Jewish periodical editors and writers. Over time,...
Yadeinu Shafchu Es Hadam Hazeh
After the horror, the disbelief, the shock, the emptiness, I next thought what many others must have. He had to have been a pedophile. I messaged a colleague, a respected rov, and asked what...
On the Petira of Leiby Kletzky, z”l
My apologies for not posting this early yesterday, when it was issued. AS STATEMENT FROM AGUDATH ISRAEL OF AMERICA Along with all of Klal Yisroel, Agudath Israel of America joins in deeply mourning the...
Want to Be Ugly? Buy LUSH
By now, everyone has heard the one about the two guys sitting next to each other on a Tel Aviv bus. The guy looking at Haaretz can’t believe that the fellow sitting next to...
Where Less Can Be More
“Can she have a cookie with a Pentagon-K on the box?” the voice on the phone asked and, after receiving my polite but negative response (a Pentagon-K?—now the Defense Department’s in the kashrus business?...
Postscript to a Tale of Rabbinic Wisdom
Quite a number of readers voiced surprise at my earlier piece that that a get could be valid despite the husband’s obvious expectation of a payoff that never came. (Because they overlapped, we only...
Can An Animal Change Its Tza’ar Ba’alei Chaim Spots?
Can practices fully accepted halachically become unacceptable because of changed technology? According to Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, it seems so. It has decided that methods of handling animals before shechitah that were used in the...
Esav and the New Modern Family
The closest we get to soap opera in Chumash is Esav’s family tree in Bereishis 36, replete with many intimations of incest and other illicit relationships (see Mizrachi 36:2). According to the New York...