A glass gem instead of a diamond
16 bKislev 5767 “After the prince lost the first two diamonds that the king gave him, the king gave him a beautifully cut glass gem for the prince’s ring.” That is the parable used...
The El Al Boycott
If the morning’s news is to be believed, the threatened chareidi boycott of El Al for 18 flights last Shabbos will result in El Al entering into a legally enforceable agreement to never again...
Burning down our own neighborhood — Reconsidered
What follows is not a recantation of my recent column “Burning Down Our Own Neighborhood.” Nevertheless, if an issue is worth writing about at all, there are usually two sides to it, and any...
Blame, Bava Kamma, and the Santa Monica Driver
There was very little closure when a judge recently ordered probation for George Weller, the 89 year-old man who three years earlier steered his car on a swath of deadly destruction in a Santa...
Ahead to the past
Here is my sister’s travelogue from her recent visit to our mother’s birthplace in Berlin: I had to choose whether to fly with my husband and two of our boys to Berlin, or whether...
Chiddush in Our “Beis Medrash”
By Yaakov Rosenblatt Hewed by Hashem into the essence of man is the need – the unmistakable and existential need – to add something to the experiences, choices, and lifestyle of the generation before...
Pelosi’s Father Aided Jews of the Shoah
With mounting fears in some circles that the Democratic Party’s long-standing support of Israel is perceptibly waning, we know of at least one high-ranking member for whom commitment to Jewish causes runs in the...
Givers don’t absorb
A few weeks ago, I spent a day with Rabbi Shlomo Raanan, the founder of Ayelet HaShachar, an organization that has placed religious families on sixty-five non-religious kibbutzim and yishuvim in recent years. In...
Moving to the ‘Burbs
Tensions between religious and non-religious Jews and religious Jews occasioned by the move of religious Jews to upscale suburbs have long been a staple of both American Jewish fiction and sociological writing. Nearly half...
People in Glass Houses
Last week’s General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities in Los Angeles was organized as a show of solidarity with Israel in the wake of the last summer’s war in Lebanon. The solidarity, however,...