‘Oh, come on!” the e-mail read. “What’s a few dead children on the altar of my liberal slippery-slope paranoia?” Gruesome as the imagery was, I had to smile. The message was intended as a humorous ‘Touché” from an academic who had originally contacted me in anger. He was not only honest enough to concede his error, but also perceptive enough to identify its origin.Read More
My 13-year-old son, Menachem, is my valued chavruta, or study partner; he has a keen and creative mind, and I hope he will one day become a true talmid chochom, or religious scholar. We study Talmud together every evening and Sabbath; Menachem’s mornings at yeshiva are also filled with the study of religious texts.But he knows how toRead More
The voice on the phone several years back could have belonged only to one of two people, and I really had no reason to imagine that Henry Kissinger would be calling me. To my greater honor, the caller was Rabbi Naftali (Herman) Neuberger, president of Baltimore’s Ner Israel Rabbinical College (where I studied in the early 1970s).Neuberger passedRead More
Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators flocked to Washington, D.C. on April 25 for a rally in support of legal abortion. Thousands of the participants attended as members of an assortment of Jewish organizations. And many of those Jewish participants nurtured a deep conviction that their stance expressed a deeply Jewish value.They were wrong.To beRead More
Is it wrong for Jews to believe that Jews should marry other Jews?The question was raised during the national political campaign in 2000, in the context of Senator Joseph Lieberman’s vice presidential candidacy. As an observant Jew, the senator was assumed to embrace the religious tradition’s view on intermarriage, a viewRead More
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