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,...
Amos vs. Amos Oz
The Israeli media has been focused on the late Amoz Oz, whom many consider Israel’s top writer and who passed away a fortnight ago. The world media also gave Oz’s passing a great deal...
Regulating Yeshivas? A Neutral Law Analysis
Michael J. Broyde We’re not lacking in opinions about the New York State Education Departments’ new regulations concerning private schools and yeshivas. To move to the practical requires some horse-sense about likely outcomes. What...
Minding Our A.Q.s and M.Q.s
James D. Watson, the 90-year-old Nobel laureate co-discoverer of DNA’s structure, is recovering from a car accident and, at least in person, currently out of the public eye. But he is very much in...
Genetics and Mimetics
When my family lived in Providence, Rhode Island back in the 1980’s and early ‘90s, I heard rumors that some of the city’s residents of Cape Verdean ancestry had a strange custom. Friday afternoons,...
Yaffed and the War on Jewish Education
by RYM and Jeff Ballabon. As alumni of both elite Ivy-League Universities and revered yeshivos, we know that the scholarship, energy and forward-looking motion within Judaism today arises primarily from those who sacrifice an advanced formal secular curriculum in favor of additional Torah study.