So much of contemporary North American Jewish life is like running a heat lamp outdoors in the winter. It is so inefficient, so attenuated by the entropy of contemporary society, and still overwhelmed by (post-)Christian[…]
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Author: Drew Kaplan
“When you vote, you hopefully evaluate the full gamut of issues and discover that on some issues one party’s views are more in accordance with Torah and on others it is the other party’s, and often neither are”
I understand that we have both College Democrats and College Republicans chapters on our campus. To be honest, I don’t understand why. Don’t get me wrong — I can readily understand why a Torah Jew[…]
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“…impeachment had all but vanished from English practice when American delegates to the Constitutional Convention provided for it…”
Impeachment is an ancient relic, a rusty legal instrument and political weapon first wielded by the English Parliament, in 1376, to wrest power from the King by charging his ministers with abuses of power, convicting[…]
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Considering the paradoxes of Sukkot
I love the paradoxes of Sukkot: a holiday with profound universalistic theological overtones that became politically important for particularists; a holiday that uses the metaphor of the sukkah both to imagine the canopy under which[…]
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“…as creators of Halakhah, we must work to make sure that every halakhically committed voice is genuinely heard”
…communities need joy to survive, and Modern Orthodoxy cannot be built on constant moral self-denial. It is true that as subjects of Halakhah, our foremost duty is to find ways to obey even when our[…]
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“The decision of which siddur a congregation should use is both a significant choice for any congregation, and a choice whose importance should not be exaggerated”
The decision of which siddur a congregation should use is both a significant choice for any congregation, and a choice whose importance should not be exaggerated. Purchasing a new siddur is a significant expense for[…]
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“the Artscroll Siddur is the product of a worldview which does not reflect the values of the Modern Orthodox community and therefore cannot truly meet the needs of our community”
…the Artscroll Siddur is the product of a worldview which does not reflect the values of the Modern Orthodox community and therefore cannot truly meet the needs of our community. There is no indication that[…]
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“The reality of this primary process is that if you aren’t on the stage in Houston next week, you aren’t going to be the Democratic nominee”
…the 10 men and women not on the stage will argue that the Democratic National Committee’s rules on how to qualify for the Houston debate (2% in four early state or national polls and 130,000[…]
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“Twitter, in its imposed brevity, seems to affirm the aphorism’s original meaning: be intelligently succinct”
What of Twitter? “Brevity is the soul of wit,” Shakespeare’s Polonius says, issuing the greatest unintentional aphorism in literature: at the time, scholars say, the line meant merely that concision is the essence of useful[…]
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Challenges of reconstructing Rashi’s Torah commentary: “there never was an Urtext of Rashi’s Torah commentary”
…synopsis of the current state of knowledge regarding medieval Jewish scribal practice, manuscript production, and fluid redaction that led to multilinear production shows that texts continued to evolve long after their initial publication. Authors never[…]
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