Jewish Blogs

Purim: Living the Secret

The Shivelei Pinchas notes that the essence of Purim is found in one extra letter in the Megilah, “Layehudim l’abdam,” “to destroy the Jews”, which is spelled with an extra yud. Haman’s goal was to take away our “pintele Yid”-the aspect of holiness within us that is eternal. That deep spark came to the fore when Mordechai told Hasach “Parshat hakesef,”-the ...

Purim, Drinking, and Consent: The Jewish Community’s Role in Preventing Sexual Violence

In the end, I hung the plastic bag of condoms on the door handle of my hotel room. In the manner of a trip staffer, I’d sleep like the dead every night, so if someone was making a ruckus outside or making a show of taking a condom out of the bag, I never knew it. I didn’t count the ...

Pundits on Pluto

Nicholas Kristof was intoxicated.That’s not a value judgment. It was The New York Times columnist’s own self-assessment in a February 1 column, his inebriation the result of having been amid a crowd of Egyptian protesters against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the end of January. No alcohol was involved, of course; the crowd was overwhelmingly Muslim. ...

Proposal to only rent to Jews in Crown Heights sounds like Nazi Germany

Crown Heights is on the road to becoming the next Williamsburg and it’s chassidic residents feel the need to fight back. A recent letter to the famous mud slinging chabad website called COL, blamed landlords for being too open with who they rent to. Basically, the author of the letter is demanding rental profiling to keep goyim out. I wonder ...

Proof that the Internet Asifa Worked

I had to dig deep into my google statistics the other day to get some information for an advertiser and I noticed something startling. While my traffic for the months of June and July was quite normal, my traffic sources from regular keywords were completely different than normal. You see, I normally get a lot of traffic from the following ...

Progress Report: The Worried Waiting of West Side Jewish Women

Our question lately is, if Orthodox Judaism says that modesty is such a virtue, then why is it imposed upon women and not men? Shouldn’t men also be modest in all the ways they require women to be? Why not?We posted this below four years ago, 3/3/08. Is there any progress to report after four years? Looks to us like ...

Professor Alan F. Segal has passed away

My friend and colleague Alan F. Segal passed away yesterday, Sunday Feb. 13. I knew Alan for over thirty years and treasured his friendship and collegiality. He was a great intuitive scholar and thinker whose mind sailed across centuries and disciplines. He made great contributions to his fields of study in numerous books, articles, reviews and lectures.Alan also made many ...

Pro-Israel? Anti-Israel? No, Just Israel.

Last week, the American Jewish Committee renounced a statement made by one of its staffers. The AJC’s Director on Anti-Semitism suggested that some Israel supporters are distorting the 1964 Civil Rights Act when they argue that colleges – that hire anti-Israel professors and support anti-Israel rallies – are in violation of the law. The director said that the Israel supporters went too ...

Priorities in Paying Wages

The Chafetz Chaim writes that if you hire two workers and you only have enough money to pay one, you must pay the more impoverished worker first. This is hinted at in the Torah, which mentions the word ani (a poor person) in connection with the commandment of paying a worker on time.If both workers are equally poor and one of them is a ...

Prince Harry’s Wild Vegas Adventures

HERE’S A PIECE OF SHOCKING NEWS: Prince Harry likes to party and so do most 20 and 30 year olds. But his late night revelries are scrutinized more closely than everyone because he is a member of the royal family.So it was not surprising to hear the outrage and anger emanating from England, when Prince Harry was caught on video ...

Premarital Sex Crisis: Why the YU Beacon article is such a big deal

I remember way back in the mid 90′s when the frum community started to awaken to the fact that high school aged kids were leaving the path in droves. At first everyone denied it was happening, but slowly parents admitted to their wayward children and things started to happen. Camps and yeshivas appeared on the scene and at some point ...

Praying Outdoors

They were small, felt, ringed in blue. We wore them to meals, to all of them, and of course, to services on Fridays and Saturdays. You were given two at the start. If you lost them, they were a few dollars to replace. Of course, they were yarmulkes, even though we never called them that, choosing, instead, to call them ...