All In a Day’s Work
Almost always, I shy away from mixing business with blogging pleasure. Too many people, I fear, would just not appreciate how I spend a good deal of my working day. Essentially, my job at...
Messages in the Mayhem
You’ll log many a mile to find someone more disapproving than I am of the anger and vilification that characterize so much of American political discourse. But to lay the tragic January 8 shooting...
The Forward Backs Off
… and should be commended for it. Readers may recall that several months ago, I lampooned The Forward for categorizing support for Sholom Rubashkin as having “exposed the vastly different worldviews that can exist...
Urgent Adoption Issue
From an Agudah press release: Agudath Israel of America has accused the Rensselaer Department of Social Services of violating state law by working to have two Jewish children (a brother and sister) adopted by...
College Students Not Learning Much
This is the headline on CBSNews.com, describing a study published in a new book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Given that students are going to courses and acquiring lots of new information,...
Rabbi Zechariah Fendel z”l
I note with great sadness the petirah last week of Rabbi Zechariah Fendel z”l. In the days before Artscroll made everything accessible to us, Rabbi Fendel was one of the first to understand the...
Jewish Traits Gone Bad
I have long suspected that the Jewish stereotypes invoked by comedians, impolite pundits, and anti-Semites contain some grain of truth. After all, even a powerfully positive middah, or personal trait, can, if mangled or...
Sarah Palin and the State of Halachic Discourse
Last week, Sarah Palin went from looking very bad to looking very victimized. How and why that happened may shed some light on the conduct of an internecine dispute in progress on organ donation...
Bar Kamtza Should Not Have Been Invited to This Event Either:
On Brain Death, Cardiac Death, Defining Halakhic Death, and Trying to Hurt Torah Jews Who Disagree with You Dov Fischer Fair-minded people are torn by the subject of when a dying person has passed...