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Kingdom of Priests

I review Norman Podhoretz provocative and engaging new book, Why Are Jews Liberals?, in the current issue of National Review. (By subscription only for the moment but you can read the review on the Discovery Institute website.) In a nutshell, my answer to the question posed by the book is this: Podhoretz too quickly dismisses the most…

There are any number of angles you could take on the sensational story of Robert Joe Halderman’s unsuccessful bid to extort $2 million from David Letterman. I was struck by Halderman’s astonishing madness, if he is guilty as charged, in thinking he would ever really get away with it. In the Talmud’s tractate Sotah (3a), Reish Lakish…

I was really despairing about the seaworthiness of our old sukkah for this recently inaugurated Jewish calendar year of 5770. With Sukkot approaching this Friday night, with my wife having been sick all last week with a (suspiciously pre-seasonal) flu and me juggling work and filling in as Mr. Mom (hence the earlier break from…

Among the top 10 lies about Jews and Judaism that I listed a while back, No. 3 was: 3.) Judaism has no apocalyptic vision of the End of the World, similar to that in Christianity’s book of Revelation and certainly not one with a particular year as the deadline for wrapping up world history, as…

The Anti-Defamation League, the country’s leading group dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, is rightly sensitive to the offense of trivializing the Holocaust. Why, then, has the ADL said nothing in protest against the Darwinian biologist and bestselling atheist author Richard Dawkins and his comparison of Darwin doubters to Holocaust deniers? The ADL has objected to attempts…

If you’re ever given a choice between seeing one of two doctors about a health concern, with all else about them being apparently equal, you’d be well advised to choose the older one. Oh but won’t the young guy have all the latest techniques and therapies at his disposal, fresh from med school? Maybe or…

I’m a big believer in synchronicity — meaningful coincidence, or what you might call spooky coincidence. Of course, seeming coincidences often happen for reasons that aren’t spooky at all. They can be explained satisfactorily as the play of chance, or the not unlikely outcome of your own choices and interests in life.  So I started…

On Saturday night as Jews initiated the penitential Selichot cycle of prayers leading up to Rosh Hashanah, someone was outside two of the Orthodox synagogues in Seattle’s Seward Park neighborhood, spray-painting swastikas, the word “Nazi,” and “Fourth Riech” (misspelled) on the doors and sidewalks outside. Of course everyone’s very upset here, understandably so, but my…

Anyone who has spent time in the pages of the Talmud and other rabbinic literature will know the distinction between halachah and aggadah — law and story. The nature of Jewish law, while being everywhere tortuously argued, is assumed otherwise to be straightforward. In the Talmud, a discussion of halachah seeks to define the path…

If you think of yourself as anything like a thoughtful person — I can’t use the word “intellectual” without cringing — it’s not generally held to be in good taste to say you’re keenly awaiting the debut of Dan Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, on Tuesday. Yet I admit I put in my Amazon order…
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