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...
Vaccination Proclamation
The threats and vulgarities bellowed by several visibly Orthodox Jews at members of the New York State Assembly in Albany after it narrowly passed a measure ending religious exemptions for immunizations were ugly and...
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...
Love, Hate and the Holocaust
Considering that a survey last year revealed that 31 percent of Americans, and 41 percent of millennials, believe that two million or fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and that 41 percent of...
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...
Why AOC’s Comments Crossed the Border
Every politician knows you can’t needlessly offend ethnic and other constituencies. The idea that you can make a career out of bigotry towards a particular minority is a notion America was supposed to have discarded 50 years ago.
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...
The Equality Act: A Direct Assault on Jewish Values
At its root, the Equality Act declares the Torah to be a bigoted document, and all those who follow its guidance to be bigots as a result. This is true because the Torah says that man and woman are different, that marriage is between man and woman, and that certain relationships are pure while others prohibited.