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, […]

“So there is this wonderful speaker that is coming to our community, I think you should come tonight and hear her. She talks about what its like to be an Orthodox Jew in the City.” Ugh, why would I want to go and hear a speaker like that, I say to myself.  To be fair […]

Last Saturday night, after three days of being off-line due to Rosh Hashana and Shabbos, I powered up my iPhone, and the emails started flooding in. Apparently during the holiday a story broke about a pre-Rosh Hashana El Al flight to Israel (LY4) which took off from JFK and was full of Hasidic men who refused to […]

As I write these words, our brothers in Israel have entered Gaza to weed out terrorists. This mission is occurring during the Three Weeks – a time of mourning over the destruction of our Temple which begins on the 17th of Tammuz and ends on Tisha B’Av. We are told that the Second Temple was […]

A couple weeks ago we started an initiative to address an issue we were hearing more and more about: ex-Haredi Jews who want to remain observant but who don’t feel welcome or know how to fit into the non-Haredi Orthodox Jewish world. One of our advisors – a person who is a lot more rational […]

There is a story told about the late rabbi and physicist Aryeh Kaplan: As a teenager he began to explore Orthodox Judaism and spent a short time in yeshiva. After his brief stint, he wasn’t so convinced that observant life was for him, so he decided to leave. But he was a bit nervous as […]