Only rarely does history provide an unambiguous answer to hotly debated issues of policy. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, for instance, was a complete rebuttal to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s boast at...
Hot off the presses (of this month’s Jewish Observer) is Rabbi Avi Shafran’s take on the Intelligent Design controversy. Some of his arguments you may have seen here before, but much else is new....
Joe – You came closer than anyone to denting my argument. (UCLA Law has done well by you. You are hereby entitled to an extra piece of kugel next time you come for Shabbos.)...
Some folks – in the Comments section, and in personal communications – really disagreed with my piece on Tookie. I disagree back. The common denominator of the malaise of the largest group is that...
On the execution of Tookie Williams, I believe that Rabbi Adlerstein’s position is brilliantly written, masterfully argued, and, nonetheless, wrong. “It is hard to find a more convincing argument to reject it, than that...
Tookie should not have been executed. He may have been a bad man, but he was done in by bad law. Tookie should not have been executed by the State of California, because his...
Ori Pomerantz wrote: Oral Torah seems to limit capital punishment to the point where it would almost never happen. IIRC, capital punishment requires two witnesses with foreknowledge of the crime who warned the would...
Fresh from dealing with Harry Potter and witchcraft, Jewish parents must now pass judgment on the Lion King, coming to a theater near you. Assume, for the moment, that there are no outright halachic...
Here we go again. Yet another Rabbi thundering away that “calling Conservative Judaism a halachic movement is intellectually dishonest,” and pointing out that there’s not much standing between the commitment to observance of your...
What would happen in Ori’s hypothetical mass teshuva of heterodox clergy? Would the laity become observant, or would they opt out of Judaism? My guess is that most would do neither. In fact, most...
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