Jewish Blogs



Latest Posts

What is Teshuvah?

As we approach the Jewish New Year there is an effort  to at least attempt to enter Rosh Hashanah clean from sin. Unfortunately, we have made bad choices, we have done wrong in our lives. How are we to start a fresh year with joy and confidence if we are carrying all the baggage of mistakes we have made. It ...

Read More

What is Rabbi Shmuley Boteach?

What is Rabbi Shmuley Boteach? He is a lightning rod, an author, a speaker, a frequent talk show guest, a reality TV star, and now a candidate for a Congressional seat in New Jersey. He is loved by some and hated by others. He is at times the staunchest proponent of traditional Jewish life and values, while also doing things ...

Read More

“What is Needed After Food,” a Poem by Alicia Ostriker

Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, Alicia Ostriker has published fourteen poetry collections, including The Book of Seventy, which received the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry. To further our celebration of National Poetry Month, Ostriker has allowed us to reprint a poem from her newest collection, The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011.Ostriker begins the preface ...

Read More

What is “Displaced Talmudic Energy?”

Jenna Weissman Joselit asks at HuffPost, “Do These Amazing Jews Have ‘Displaced Talmudic Energy?’” If we bought the analysis referred to in the article about talented contemporary Jews, we would begin to refer to this syndrome as DTE. Alas we do not buy the theory.The Talmud is a literature with distinctive contents and ways of thinking about the world. If ...

Read More

What does out of town mean to you?

I never started hearing the term “out of town” until I started going to yeshiva, people referred to my yeshiva as out of town and I always wondered if they realized that we were in the middle of a metropolitan area with 800,000 people or so, it didn’t seem too out of town to be going to yeshiva in the ...

Read More

What do you think of this singles weekend ad?

Are you looking for a great place to go with beautiful accommodations and an awesome atmosphere? Join us as we host the most amazing Shabbat Nachamu ever in the newly renovated (26 Million Dollars) Hanover Marriott in NJ! With the passing of Leibby Kletzky A’H which threw the NY region into turmoil, as well as the upcoming anniversary of the ...

Read More

What do you think of the Rubashkin case?

I received a phone call last night from a good friend of mine asking me what I thought of the current effort to influence the proceedings of the Rubashkin trial. I had no answer for him and that bothered me. To tell the truth, I haven’t been paying much attention to the Rubashkin. As someone in the Jewish media, I ...

Read More

What Do You Eat On Shabbat?

We all know that food plays an important role in our Shabbat routine. We know that we have a halachic obligation for three Shabbat meals. Many of us know that the Ari emphasized a kabbalistic importance to these meals. And many of us are very much set on a particular menu for Shabbat.This is not a deep post. Yet the ...

Read More

What do Chabad, secular Jews and settlers all have in common?

I know, those crazy guys, ugh, who can’t have an opinion about this simultaneously outgoing and completely insular group?  Oooo, they’re so nice, they must be up to something right?  Plus I hear they roll with that whole Baal Shem Tov crowd.  Oh boy, I’ve heard they’re trouble.Read More: @ frumsatire.net

Read More

What Can we Learn from Jewish Women Partisans?

Thanks to the success of feature film Defiance (2008), Americans now associate the history of Jewish partisans with the hunky Bielski brothers, played by Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jaime Bell. In the film’s depiction of their society hidden deep in the forest women contributed by cooking and gathering food but not so much as leaders or fighters. The real story of ...

Read More

We’ve Got Mishugas, My Friend. Right Here in River City.

The other day I had to decide which of four important things to do right away. 1) Pay some long-overdue bills. 2) Catch a chipmunk that had somehow gotten in my basement. 3) Get the car ready to pick my son up at college later in the day. 4) Watch a musical.So as “The Music Man” began, I was listening ...

Read More

Werner Sombart: Portrait of an Anti-Semite

Can an anti-Semite reach correct conclusions about Jews? Here is Jeffrey Herf in his book Reactionary Modernism on the work of Werner Sombart, a leading German sociologist of the early twentieth century:“Sombart stressed four aspects of European Jewish social history that contributed to the origins of modern capitalism. First, the Jews were dispersed in different countries and thus had international contacts. Second, their existence as ...

Read More