U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann are among ten individuals who have been named 2013 Orthodox Jewish All Stars by Jew in the City, the organization dedicated to re-branding Orthodox Jews and Judaism to the world through digital media. This year’s All Stars are an extremely accomplished and diverse group, and, in addition […]

In Judaism, life is the most holy thing that exists; the Talmud teaches, “He who saves a single life, saves the world entire.” Twenty-five years ago, an Orthodox Jewish man named Jack Forgash read a statistic in the newspaper that troubled him: one in eleven pregnancies in Israel were ending in abortion. He wondered if […]

Two simple stories. Two small acts of kindness performed by Orthodox Jews that wouldn’t be newsworthy if we didn’t bother to tell them. The first story happened earlier this week when a man was collecting charity for the wedding fund of a poor bride. The man was going from door to door in the “ultra-Orthodox” neighborhood […]

Sometimes, life comes full circle in the most unexpected ways. The circle in this story began almost thirty years ago at Mt. Sinai hospital in the city where my father was training to become a doctor. While there, my father – a very secular Jew – treated many Satmar Chasidim. He couldn’t stand them, and […]

If a person relied only on recent headlines to judge the Satmar community as a whole – which I’d venture to say that most people do – they’d have a pretty negative view of it. And that’s because those who do daily acts of kindness and possess refined character traits are almost never reported on. That […]