Category: Other

When I think about the people who shaped me, I think about Sylvia Wygoda.

She didn’t hold public office, cure an incurable disease, or win a Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, she never sought the spotlight at all. She spent her life telling the…

New York’s state Young Republicans organization has been disbanded in the wake of leaked group chats in which officials joked about gas chambers, praised Adolf Hitler and used racist, antisemitic and homophobic slurs. 

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Ruth Adler is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and creates in both Toronto and Tel Aviv. Working in painting, textile collage and video, her vibrant practice has been exhibited internationally since the 1980s.

Adler, currently in Toronto,…

I’m a progressive. I’m a Jew. And I’m appalled.

In New York City this week, a far-left group calling itself the Bronx Anti-War Coalition organized a so-called “vigil” to mark the one-year anniversary of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s…

The Torah famously opens not with the first mitzvah given to Israel but with a cosmic declaration:

“כֹּחַ מַעֲשָׂיו הִגִּיד לְעַמּוֹ, לָתֵת לָהֶם נַחֲלַת גּוֹיִם” (Psalms 111:6)

“He…

Christophe Lebold’s lyrical biography of the Canadian singer and literary figure, Leonard Cohen: The Man Who Saw The Angels Fall (ECW Press), is definitive in its comprehensiveness. The author, a professor of literature at the University of…

37 — Totafos and the Tongues of the World

Our Gemara on Amud Beis offers a scriptural source for the four compartments in the tefillin that rest on the head. The Torah uses the word “Totafos,” an unusual term, perhaps translated as a…

He died on Monday night during the Festival and his righteous wife/widow gave strict orders that it be…

I feel like I need to issue an apology to Simchat Torah. After three chagim filled with lots of shul, setting tables, and cooking it makes sense that a lot of Jews feel burnt out by the time Simchat Torah and Shemini Atzeret rolls around. I…

I was invited to the Memorial Ceremony yesterday at Kfar Azza, one of the hardest hit kibbutzim, on the national day of mourning for victims of the Hamas massacres on October 7^th.

It was shocking to see an entire section of a cemetery in…