In a world of increasing anti-Semitism, I recently met an unexpected advocate for Orthodox Jews. Michel King is a fifty-year old Irish Catholic woman with a passion for praising and defending the Orthodox Jewish community. That’s because some of her first friends in life (growing up in Borough Park, Brooklyn) were her Orthodox Jewish neighbors. […]

When Rabbi Daniel Cohen was twenty-one years old, his mother (who was forty-four at the time) died suddenly of an aneurysm. Losing a parent unexpectedly at such a young age profoundly affected him. “We were speaking on the phone one day, then she was gone the next,” Rabbi Cohen recalls. His mother had taught him […]

When I was first making the transition from Conservative to Orthodox, an observant Conservative family I knew invited me over for Shabbos essentially to have an “intervention.” “Look,” they told me, “you can be kosher and shomer Shabbos without becoming one of THEM. If you become Orthodox – you’ll become a rock-thrower.” Where did an intelligent, […]

Dear Jew in the City, Everything is predetermined by Hashem and is gam zu l’tovah (ultimately all for the good), therefore, everything is bashert (meant to be), effectively, even if it appears to be detrimental. But humans (not animals) have free choice in their actions, so how is that reconciled? But if everything is predetermined and gam […]

On July 26th 2010, Charlene and Jonathan Aminoff went wave running with their sons (near their apartment in Miami) while their two year old daughter, Gali, napped by the pool with her nanny. When they returned from the outing, the Aminoffs were confronted with blood curdling screams. A man they didn’t know was holding a dead […]