A Few Musings from Vacation
My “vacation” from writing articles about the issues and controversies of the day has been quite refreshing – and quite educational. I think that I have learned or reviewed more life lessons in the...
Cross-Currents Blog
Rabbinic Outcry Against Lavish Weddings in the 17th Century
You think this is a new problem? Think again. R. Moshe Cheifetz (Venice, late 17th, early 18th century) very often picks up on the juxtaposition of pesukim and phrases that seem to have little...
Tempest in a Tallis
The image was, to be sure, jarring: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump being draped in a tallis. By an African-American pastor. In a Detroit church. To resounding applause. Bishop Wayne Jackson of the Great...
Wise Words From YU’s Next President
The news got out earlier today that YU’s search committee at arrived at a choice for a successor to President Richard Joel. Rabbi Ari Berman, a former spiritual leader of The Jewish Center in...
As Memory turns to History
In the span of less than two months, the Jewish people have lost two of its most renowned and articulate Holocaust survivors, Elie Weisel and Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis. Naturally, there is a personal loss...
Conservatism in Crisis
If the phrase “alt-right” puts you in mind of a computer keyboard, you are (blessedly) not following the presidential campaign. Even if you are aware of the phrase, though, you may not have a...
The Trump Tallis and Outsider Journalism
Who’s more likely to get us wrong – journalists far removed from our community and its thought, or academic scholars outside their field of competence? The answer should be obvious: a journalist from outside...
For Whom the Bell Doth Not Toll: The New Pew and an Elul Challenge
“If they understood the effect the chiming of the church bells had on the Jewish soul, they would never stop them.” So observed a Torah sage of a different generation, when the grandeur and...
Unrighteous Indignation
And here, all this time, we thought Auschwitz was a Polish death camp. It was, of course, at least in the sense that it was a place in Poland where upward of a million...
Volozhin’s Got Talent!
Pragmatic isolationism vs. an obligation to share the Torah’s vision with non-Jewish Americans. Pose those choices to a group of charedi-identifying yeshiva students who expressed an interest in conservative politics. What would you expect...
