What are some good ways to stay active when it’s cold outside?

Soup, glorious soup! It fills your tummy, nourishes your soul and brings you back for more. When the weather turns cold, there’s nothing more comforting than a steamy bowl of hot homemade soup. Soup warms you up on a cold winter day, spreading the feeling of contentment and satisfaction. Soups are extremely versatile, letting you […]

There is an Israeli folk tale about how the sufganiya, the ubiquitous Chanukah doughnut, got its name.

Misconception: Of the two Megillah readings on Purim, the one at night is the more important one. Therefore, one should be careful to attend the nighttime reading even if he or she will thereby miss the morning reading. Fact: Halachically, the morning reading is more important than the night reading. Background: The Shulchan Aruch (OC […]

This slim volume packs a major spiritual punch. Rabbi Avraham Steinberg, renowned scholar, noted author, expert in Jewish medical halachah and general editor

Q: Often at business functions, I can only partake of the fruits and vegetables since the rest of the food is not kosher. Most of the time, the fruit is already cut. In such a scenario, is it permitted to eat the cut fruit?

The Jewish world has an uneasy relationship with the working mother. On the one hand, we understand that she is an economic necessity,

Overwhelmed. Exhausted. Stressed. Somewhat surprisingly, few of the women we interviewed for our cover story on balancing career and family used the words above

Everyone I knew growing up fasted on Yom Kippur and had a Pesach Seder. While not everyone kept kosher or celebrated Shabbat, there were certain customs and lifecycle events that were virtually universal.

On Shabbat Chanukah of 2006, my older sister Sandy passed away. Raised a secular Jew, she had arranged to have her body cremated and gave her friend Brian, a Buddhist, power of attorney. She wished to have her ashes and those of her daughter, my sweet niece Ola who had died in 2000 at the […]

Which country boasts some of the fastest-growing Jewish communities in the world, outside of Israel? Surprisingly, it’s Germany. Who would have predicted that some 120,000 Jews would settle in Germany, with more than 20,000 residing in its capital? Even more astounding, Torah Judaism is on the rise in Germany, with a thriving Orthodox community of […]

Accept Your Decision to Work and Come to Terms with It. Don’t let other people’s remarks create unnecessary guilt

With canes in their hands and anticipation on their faces, a number of men and women made their way to the Pearlstone Retreat Center’s main lobby. They had traveled from around the country to the Maryland retreat to experience Shabbat with people just like themselves—Jews who could neither see the light of the Shabbat candles […]

Professor Benny Kraut’s delightful history of the Yavneh student organization shows how college students can and have permanently altered the Jewish world.

Rabbi David Hartman was once a leading student of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik but his intellectual path has long since diverged from his teacher’s.

A rabbi’s contribution to the extensive minyan hamitzvot literature, books that count and explain the Torah’s 613 commandments, serves as a personality test.

The Eastern European shtetl, for which we often wax nostalgic, began its decline in the mid-nineteenth century as the combination of urbanization, Enlightenment ideas

If you are asked to speak at a family or a friend’s simchah, you probably won’t have too much trouble coming up with some fine accolades and an amusing anecdote or two to relate about the newly-married couple,

Yaakov ben Moshe Levi Moelin, better known as the Maharil, lived in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Mainz, Germany during the aftermath of the Bubonic Plague (the Black Death). He witnessed the barbaric attacks on the Jewish communities of Germany and Austria by the gentiles who blamed them for poisoning the wells […]

Last year, our eleven-year-old son joined the Boy Scouts. One Motzaei Shabbos, soon thereafter, he began, on his own, to set up for Havdalah. I truly appreciated this display of consideration, and I complimented him. He cheerfully replied, “A Scout helps other people at all times!” (The first Scout law.)

Ronald Reagan was president when we began. We continued through “Bush the First,” two Clinton terms, a double dose of “Bush the Second,”

Devotees of Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm’s masterful writings are in for a treat with the publication of Derashot LeDorot.

The halachic issues surrounding organ donation and brain stem death have hovered in constant conflict for over three decades.