A prince once lay dying, and seeing that the doctors could do no more for him, the frantic king sent for a tzaddik known to be a master of medicine. The tzaddik told the king, “There is one cure that might help him. There is a rare precious gem that, if crushed and mixed into a

  Misconception: Leading authorities including Rambam and Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook maintain that korbanot, animal sacrifices, will not be reinstated in the time of the Third Temple but will be replaced with grain offerings. Fact: Rambam and Rav Kook never assert that animal sacrifices will not be reinstated in the Third Temple. Background: Temple […]

  Screenwriter Clashes with Scary Hollywood Executive, Part I The studio executive hated me. Or at least, she hated a critical exchange in my script, A Stranger Among Us. The scene is between Leah (Mia Sara), the seventeen-year-old daughter of a Chassidic rebbe, and Emily Eden (Melanie Griffith), a hardened New York City detective who […]

Collected Essays, Vol. I By Haym Soloveitchik Littman Library of Jewish Civilization Oxford, 2013 352 pages Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Woolf Professor Haym Soloveitchik is the leading contemporary practitioner of the discipline of “History of Halachah,” which examines the interaction of halachic tradition with protean reality. Over the past four decades, he has enriched Jewish scholarship […]

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, remembering Orthodox Jewry and the Civil Rights Movement In December 1958, Rabbi Isadore Goodman of Memphis traveled up to Indianapolis to help celebrate the dedication of a new Orthodox synagogue building. In his remarks, the Southern rabbi spoke about Orthodox Jewry’s role in the raging Civil Rights […]

I used to be a regular visitor to the New York Public Library’s Dorot Division, consulting its vast collection of rabbinic texts with the assistance of its expert librarians. While I treasure the memories of the many hours I spent there, I have not actually stepped foot into a library in ages. As long as […]

I’ve never met a latke I didn’t like. Chanukah is still one of my favorite holidays, and to me, hot, crispy latkes taste best straight from the skillet. Latkes always bring back wonderful memories from my childhood, counting my Chanukah gelt and spinning the dreidel at family Chanukah celebrations. My mother always made traditional latkes […]

My mother’s death brought to life a disturbing realization. Although she will always be the precious woman I call “Mommy,” I never really knew her. During shivah, I spoke about how she survived the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and a death march, broken and alone. But I lacked a sense of who my mother was as […]

It began with a text message. Rav [Dovid] Stav* wants you to call him. I called. “There’s a young [secular] woman whose mother is originally from [a city in South America]. All we have is her parents’ ketubah, but we cannot identify the mesader Kiddushin [rabbi who performs the wedding ceremony]. They were members of […]

Rabbi Hershel Schachter, rosh yeshivah at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and OU posek, speaks with Jewish Action about the conflict between Torah and science. Jewish Action: Did the Tannaim and Amoraim learn science from the Torah or from the scientists of their generations? Rabbi Hershel Schachter: The Gemara says in the first […]

By Yamin Levy It’s been a quarter of a century since I joined the rabbinate. I’ve earned my battle stripes, and I still believe that a good pulpit rabbi can accomplish more for the Jewish people in the rabbinate than in any other career. And yet, even in the best of circumstances—in synagogues where the […]

Our New Special Baby Written by Chaya Rosen Illustrated by Rivkie Braverman Feldheim Publishers Nanuet, New York, 2013 43 pages Reviewed by Dovid M. Cohen Our New Special Baby, written by Chaya Rosen and illustrated by Rivkie Braverman, tells the poignant story of parents sharing with their young children the news of the birth of […]

Q: I’m a sugar addict, and I especially love those caramel sufganiyot around Chanukah time; I look forward to them all year. But as I’m getting older, I’m more worried about what I’m doing to my body. Is sugar really as evil as all the health nuts make it out to be? A: Well, it […]

A generation ago, the only way to get information about a prospective business partner, employee or shidduch was to inquire among acquaintances. Torah-educated Jews had a strong awareness that the Torah puts well-defined limitations on the kind of inquiries that can be made—limitations described at length in the sefer Chofetz Chaim by Rav Yisrael Meir […]

New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought By Jeremy Brown Oxford University Press New York, 2013 416 pages Torah, Chazal and Science By Moshe Meiselman Israel Bookshop Publications New Jersey, 2013 928 pages Reviewed by Gil Student You might have thought,1 based on the plethora of Orthodox scientists and doctors, […]

Remembering Anne Samson By Batya Rosner When 175 teenagers ended up in the hospital with food poisoning at a West Coast NCSY event subsequently dubbed the “Malibu Malady Madness,” Anne Samson, a”h, stayed with them at the infirmary. She refused to have the event canceled. When the cook quit erev Shabbat at another NCSY event, […]

Writer Binyamin Ehrenkranz speaks with Rabbi Moshe Weinberger, the founding rav of Congregation Aish Kodesh in Woodmere, New York, and mashpia at Yeshiva University, about the rising popularity of neo-Chassidism and the power of the Chassidic worldview. Binyamin Ehrenkranz: Aish Kodesh was started more than twenty years ago, before Chassidus was as popular as it […]

Imagine that we treated communal prayer the way a football team treats a game.

Unlocking the Torah Text—Devarim: An In-depth Journey into the Weekly Parsha By Rabbi Shmuel Goldin OU Press/Gefen Publishing House Rabbi Shmuel Goldin’s Unlocking the Torah Text—Devarim, the fifth and final volume of this popular series, is a welcome addition to the world of Torah commentary. Following the pattern of his earlier volumes, this new book […]

This past summer, I had the privilege to participate in two OU solidarity missions to Israel—the first with fellow members of OU communities and the second with rabbinic leaders from across America. Over the course of these missions, I was able to meet with families living in southern Israel who were subjected to a constant […]

Everybody but the Maharal of Prague knows that the miracle of Chanukah has nothing to do with the winter solstice.