Jewish Blogs

Waste on Passover

I have always been a Passover hater. There aren’t that many of us, but what we lack in numbers we make up for in fervor.There are really lots of things on my list of reasons why Passover makes me angry:–two seders is too many–here’s an opportunity to trick people into buying expensive things they don’t need–would you like some cardboard ...

Washington Heights versus the Upper West Side

Whenever you talk to singles contemplating on moving out of their communities to a “singles community” you hear them debate about whether they want to move to the Upper West Side (aka UWS) or Washington Heights (aka The Heights) These debates are usually one sentence affairs that say The Heights is frummer, less shallow and more friendly and The West ...

Was Richard C. Holbrooke Jewish?

Yes, American diplomat Richard Holbrooke was a Jew.Holbrooke was born in 1941, in New York City, to Dan Holbrooke and Trudi Kearl (née Moos). Holbrooke’s mother’s Jewish family fled Hamburg in 1933 for Buenos Aires. She was a potter and said she was an atheist. His father also was said to have been an atheist. The family attended Quaker meetings.Holbrooke’s ...

Was Jesus Kosher?

Was Jesus Kosher? That question automatically demands an absolute answer. It’s a total no-brainer. No, Jesus was not and is not Kosher. There are thousands, perhaps millions of reasons that Jesus cannot be considered kosher — meaning in a narrow sense, “(of a person) Observing Jewish food laws” or “Satisfying the requirements of Jewish law” and in a wider sense, ...

Was Gandhi Jewish?

No, political leader Mohandas Gandhi was not a Jew. He was a Hindu.A new book described in a review in the WSJ (Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India, by Joseph Lelyveld) reports that Gandhi had a longtime lover who was a Jew and a Zionist.WSJ: Among the HagiographersEarly on Gandhi was dubbed a ‘mortal demi-god’—and he has ...

Was Benoît Mandelbrot Jewish?

Yes, Benoît Mandelbrot was a Jew. The Times obituary says he, “was born on Nov. 20, 1924, to a Lithuanian Jewish family in Warsaw. In 1936 his family fled the Nazis, first to Paris and then to the south of France…” Wikipedia says that in France, “He was helped by Rabbi David Feuerwerker, the Rabbi of Brive-la-Gaillarde, to continue his ...

Was Abbie Hoffman Jewish and the first to say, “Sacred Cows Make the Tastiest Hamburgers”?

Was Abbie Hoffman the first to say, “Sacred Cows Make the Tastiest Hamburgers”?Probably not. Some quotations repositories attribute the saying to Mark Twain. Discussions of that attribution point out that the terms “hamburger” and “sacred cow” were not current during Twain’s lifetime. Other sources trace the quip back to 1971.The Times reports that at Hoffman’s death in 1989 his rabbi said that ...

War, Motherhood, & A Little Cheesecake

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to work with your mother and learn about her life and in doing so discover a completely different person? My mother, Mollie Weinstein Schaffer, passed away on April 8, 2012. She lived a remarkable life, and I am happy that we worked for two years on a book chronicling her life ...

Want to see violence? Go to a sushi kiddush!

Kiddush can be a violent place, this is mostly because frum Jews have a minhag to forgo breakfast on Saturday mornings due to halachos about eating before davening and the general thought that milk and cereal is not shabbosdicke, but also because most normal Jews want to be on time to shul. This and the fact that many shuls that ...

Want to know more about orthodoxy? Read Chaim Potok!

I started reading The Promise over shabbos and I must say it’s one of the best novels about orthodox Judaism I’ve ever read, it is the sequel to the more famous The Chosen and it really digs deep into issues affecting our community today. Although it’s a sequel, it’s a book worth reading without taking a look at The Chosen and I would say ...

Want to complete your conversion? Then move out of your community!

I’ve been hanging with quite a few folks in the process of converting to Judaism lately and all of them have told me their dismay when having learned that they would have to pick up their lives and move to LA or NY in order to complete the conversion process. Is this just part of the conversion process, that part ...

Vos Iz Neias changes their comments policy – is this the end of the madness?

Vos Iz Neias is the first website I look at when I open my computer, right away I know all the scandals, chillul hashem’s, arrests and other drama happening in the frum community and when I just needed a laugh I would read the comments and watch the insanity unfold before my very eyes.The comments themselves were a great disgrace ...