The Road to Gan Eden Gets Bluetooth!
Unfortunately, so does the road leading in the other direction. A new app has changed the game. This was way too strong an opening for a short piece, but I couldn’t resist. Limmud Torah...
Off-Color
Many of us pale-skinned Americans are puzzled by our darker-skinned fellow citizens’ strong negative reaction to the practice of “blackface” – Caucasians putting on black makeup to portray African-Americans. The issue burst into the...
Polar Vort
“Not as cold as Siberia.” That’s what my father, a”h, would say with a laugh if I complained over the phone about the frigid weather in Providence, where my family lived in the 1980s....
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein – What They Missed
Although I never met him, I thought I understood who he was. At the levayah on Thursday, I learned how wrong I was. I thought I understood him, because his work over the decades...
Open Letter About RCA Members Violating Female Clergy Policy
We the undersigned, all of us members of the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), including former RCA officers and executive committee members, decry the violation, by a small number of chaverim, of RCA policy...
Holocaust History Comes Home
Reaching out and touching the one of the crematoria doors in Auschwitz-Birkenau a few weeks ago was emotionally jarring. Visiting my mother’s home town of Konstanz, Germany, made it personal. My youngest son and...
Vanishing Truth
Whiplash was a distinct risk for anyone trying to follow the story – or, perhaps, non-story – of the faceoff the week before last between Kentuckian high schooler Nick Sandmann and a 64-year old...
What It’s Like Being Another Kind of ‘Black’ Jew
An article of mine about anti-haredi bias appeared in Haaretz earlier this week. It’s accessible here. If you aren’t an Haaretz subscriber or registrant, send an e-mail to [email protected] and I’ll happily e-mail you a copy.
Numbers, Not Narratives
Every civilized human being is rightly outraged by things like the vicious murders committed by members of the international Salvadoran gang MS-13, the fatal beating of the 76-year-old Georgia resident Robert Page by undocumented...
Tunnel Vision
As if New Yorkers don’t face enough challenges – insane traffic, bumbling bureaucracies, surly servicepeople and parking spaces as rare as hairy-nosed wombats – some city residents felt forced to create elaborate transportation plans,...