In Every Generation… Passover Then and Now
by Rabbi Elchonon Oberstein As we approach the holiday of Pesach, our minds go back to the sedarim of our youth, when we were together with dear ones no longer alive. I have vivid...
Life . . . and the Pursuit of (Grants to Study) Happiness
The late William F. Buckley famously quipped that he’d rather be governed by the first one hundred people in the Boston phone book than by the first one hundred academics on the Harvard faculty...
Old Wine, New Containers
What do Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer, Artscroll, and the RCA all have in common? They figured out that outsourcing was the key to intelligibility. Rav Isser Zalman gave a weekly shiur, for which he...
Bondage of the Mind
My wife took one look at an advertisement in B’nai B’rith Magazine, and said “I see a post in your future.” She was right. At first, I was tempted to offer the following as...
Stop Calling Us ‘Ultra-Orthodox’
This is the excellently-expressed sentiment of English writer Abbott Katz, appearing in this week’s Forward. “Ultra” — the modifier of choice for a press hawking its smudged cartography of Jewish religious life — has...
Deconstructing Dayeinu
Much of our Seder-night message to our children, mediated by the Haggadah, is forthright and clear. Some of it, though, is subtle and stealthy. Dayeinu, for example. On the surface, it is a simple...
Too Much Deference
Whenever I speak abroad about Israel’s security situation, I’m invariably asked: Why doesn’t the Israeli government ignore world opinion and do what it must to stop the terrorism? I always answer by pointing out...
Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum, zt”l: Mechanech
The ArtScroll Gemara is known throughout the Torah world; far fewer know the name Torah Communications Network. The General Editors responsible for the creation the ArtScroll Gemara are household names; the name of the...
The Mistake of One-Stop Torah Shopping
Diversity is a good thing, writes our own Jonathan Rosenblum. So much of the yeshiva world has been concentrated and centralized in Lakewood, that many of its gifts are increasingly denied to smaller, less...
Two Cases for Decentralization
Last month, the English Yated Ne’eman bravely published a two-part article by R’ Avraham Birnbaum on some of the consequences of the ever accelerating dominance of Lakewood within the American learning community. While the...