Op-Eds

There was a knock on the door and the young couple was startled by the sound. I answered the door, took care of business, returned to the table and asked the couple why they jumped when they heard a knock. They replied that no one knocks on a door anymore; it is considered impolite.

Farber has repeated at every opportunity that the Rabbanut maintains a “blacklist” with which it unfairly and capriciously rejects rabbis from chutz la’aretz, whereas in reality, the Rabbanut rejected Herzfeld for very substantive concerns.

In a recent, now infamous, speech PA President Mahmoud Abbas turned his attention to history’s favorite target: the Jews. This is no surprise, as the very name “Palestine” has always served to dissociate the Jews from their homeland.

The title “rabbi” in Judaism does not, in fact, denote a leader of services and Torah reader. Rather, it denotes – you guessed it – a halachic authority and spiritual leader, which is exactly the title Rabbi Riskin conferred upon these three women.

Until now, Jews accepted the anomaly of Jews being permitted to build in Bethel, New York or Shiloh, Tennessee but not in the original Bethel or Shiloh.

President Trump has moved to bar facilities that provide abortions and abortion referrals from receiving federal Title X funding. The reaction of those decrying the president’s decision is revealing.

If you had thirty drunks with knives and hatchets trying to break down your front door and penetrate into your house, what would you do? Call John Kerry? Call Bette Midler? Natalie Portman?

Tzni’us, the Jewish ethos of modesty, has been under intense discussion recently. Do we need the traditional manifestations of established tzni’us or should we apply a general definition without them?

Professor Ferziger posits that “Emerging competitors to kosher food supervision monopolies in Israel and the United States present an economic threat that could bring about fundamental changes in contemporary Orthodox Judaism in each of these centers of Jewish life”. For numerous reasons, the new competitors are profoundly unlikely to alter the larger identity of Orthodoxy..

In his recent op-ed on Arutz Sheva, “Open Orthodox Rabbi” Shmuly Yanklowitz helps unpeel one thin layer of the onion that explains why “Open Orthodoxy” is alien to Orthodox Judaism. For that reason, his article served an important purpose.