Democracies depend on buy-in; citizens need to believe in certain basics, starting with the legitimacy of elections. Trump both runs the government and runs it down. The electoral system, he asserts, can’t be trusted. Voter[…]
If biology limited women’s ability to code, then the ratio of women to men in programming ought to be similar in other countries. It isn’t. In India, roughly 40 percent of the students studying computer[…]
American cultural history could probably be parcelled out as a sequence of sensational murder cases. There was nothing remotely “typical” about the Manson murders or, for that matter, about the O. J. Simpson case, but[…]
Yeshiva College has also changed along with the broader landscape of higher education. We still have impressively bright, industrious, passionate students. But as the culture of the mid-twentieth century was replaced by that of the[…]
It’s a mistake to put Netanyahu in the same category as the strongmen riding Europe’s rightist wave. But it is not a mistake to say he learned their language and cultivated ties with them, some[…]
When it finally sunk in that I’m not the next Nabokov, I got pretty depressed for a while. I started to wish that there was some magical place where a total lack of any discernible[…]
…what has to change in the world of Jewish philanthropy and fundraising to make the system less beholden to deformed power structures. Ironically, one of the shifts that Lila points out and critiques – towards[…]
Birthright Israel, the nonprofit organization that Steinhardt started in 1999 with his billionaire friend Charles Bronfman to fund free trips to Israel for young Jews, epitomizes this shift. From its financing to its goals, Birthright[…]
Until he was brought down by revelations of decades of sexual harassment, sociologist Steven M. Cohen made a career linking intermarriage with a coming demographic doomsday for non-Orthodox Jews and propounding the danger both posed[…]
…halakha is currently paying a steep price for Orthodoxy’s exclusion of the queer community. Halakha’s *discriminatory attitude toward the gay community alienates many of MO’s younger generation. It could very well be that halakha is[…]
