Baffled by Batson
On a summer morning back in 1996, someone entered a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi and shot four people to death. The prime suspect was a man named Curtis Flowers, who had been fired...
Response to Rabbi Adam Starr and Young Israel of Toco Hills
My recent Yated article about Young Israel of Toco Hills (YITH) seceding from National Council of Young Israel (NCYI) elicited quite a firestorm on social media, to put it mildly. I would like to briefly address...
AOC and Other Items
This was a somewhat busy week in terms of writing – something I have not really done for a long while. Here is my Times of Israel post about AOC’s concentration camps remarks. Here...
Retaliation Insinuation
Pretty open-and-shut, it would seem. At a 2014 festival-cum-ski-race northeast of Anchorage, Alaska, a large crowd of revelers was being overseen by a small crew of state police. One of the officers, Sergeant Luis...
Rav Nosson Kamenetsky, zt”l
It was with great sadness that the first bit of news to reach me after Shavuos here in Yerushalayim was the petirah of R. Nosson Kamenetsky zt”l. While some will remember him for the...
Mountains to Climb
Ever find yourself in a long “10 items or less” supermarket line waiting for the cashier to check the price of kumquats for the lady who apparently considers all her fruits and vegetables to...
Aged Cheese on Shavuos, and (L’havdil) the Recent Gay Ordination Episode
Please click here for the updated OU aged cheese list, and here for an article I wrote in the Jewish Press about the recent gay ordination episode. Wishing everyone a good Yom Tov! ...
In Judaism, Abortion Is Not A Right
An article of mine on the disconnect between contemporary society’s understanding of abortion and that of Judaism was published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and can be read here
Rebuke, Consolation, and the Centrality of Eretz Yisrael: Prescient Words of Rav Soloveitchik
Torah is sometimes compared to wine, whose aficionados speak of different sensations at different places on the tongue. When Rav Soloveitchik’s thoughts (below) first hit my mental palate, they answered a question I had...
Repeal the Right to Guns?
A sampling of recent weeks’ gun news: Pursuant to a tip, authorities found more than 1000 firearms in a home in an upscale Los Angeles neighborhood (not quite reaching the record of the 1,200...