A Kiddush Hashem Goes Viral
Tablet magazine carries the story of Isaac Theil (which is on the NY Daily News, as well), who was innocently riding home to Brooklyn on the Q train when a young black man (tired...
Digital Opiate of the Masses
From a recent obituary: Clifford Nass, a Stanford professor whose pioneering research into how humans interact with technology found that the increasingly screen-saturated, multitasking modern world was not nurturing the ability to concentrate, analyze...
Is Women of the Wall Anti-Israel?
Matzav.com is running an article entitled “EXPOSED: Women of the Wall Linked To Rabidly Anti-Israel Groups,” which it reprinted from Jerusalem Online. But if you go looking for the original article, you won’t find...
Jonathan Sarna, Please Call Home
Jonathan Sarna says that the RCA should know better. Writing in The Forward, Dr. Sarna, an acclaimed scholar, finds irony in the letter published a few days ago in Haaretz that responded to an...
Guide To The Perplexing – One Point of View
What issues could possibly have ignited the firestorm sweeping through the yeshiva community in Israel? A week and a half ago, one point of view was shared with the public in an impassioned presentation...
What’s New
As someone with a well-honed sense of wonder, who delights at the sight of a blue jay (even though several of them regularly greet my wife and me outside the window during autumn breakfasts)...
Times Are Strange
A lengthy op-ed in the New York Times today by one Susan Katz Miller celebrates intermarriage and the raising of children of intermarrieds in both Jewish and non-Jewish traditions. Her family “celebrates Yom Kippur,...
On The Internecine Battles in Israel and the World Series
Rabbi Moshe Grylak’s op-ed in last week’s Mishpacha calmed the frayed nerves of a community with the instant effectiveness of a double espresso on the weary. He owned up to the existence of something...
Orthodoxy and Honesty
The essay below was written for, and published by, Haaretz.com. I offer it here with that paper’s permission — and with my apologies to readers who may feel that enough has been written about...
Non-Orthodox Orthodoxy: Playing With Fire
by Avrohom Gordimer When an Orthodox rabbi’s actions cross into the realm of the non-Orthodox, the rabbi’s actions are typically defended by his sympathizers as being “within the outer bounds of Orthodoxy”. And when...