Jean Calas learned the hard way that reading a dubious peshat into a pasuk can be fatal. Mr. Calas, a Protestant, was tortured to death in 1762 on the spurious charge of having murdered...
Back in 1947, a public relations firm called Whitaker and Baxter, hired by the American Medical Association, created a term to disparage President Harry Truman’s proposal for a national health-care system. It was a...
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...
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...
“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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
