Rabbi Avi Shafran
By Rabbi Avi Shafran
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Opinion In 1939, Nazi sympathizers rallied in New York. Will history look back on today’s anti-Israel rallies with the same scorn?
Ignoring inconvenient facts can easily lead to hatred of Jews
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Opinion How did Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez get Israel so wrong?
As a Haredi Jew, I harbor politically and socially conservative views, very unlike those of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But my belief system includes a mandate to be committed to the ideal of truth. That mandate is what compelled me to rise to the defense of the progressive Congresswoman, on multiple occasions, when I felt she…
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Opinion Herman Wouk and my father-in-law: a very Jewish friendship
Sometime in the 1980s, two middle-aged Jewish gentlemen met in the small Chabad synagogue in Palm Springs, California. One was American-born and clean-shaven. The other was a slim, more obviously Orthodox man with a moustache, a black hat, and the air and accent of an Eastern European Jew. In my imagination — I wasn’t present…
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Opinion Biden’s COVID relief plan is a balm for Orthodox Jews
It’s highly unlikely that members of Congress had Jewish education, advanced Torah study or even Orthodox Jews in their minds when forging the ambitious American Rescue Plan that, after being signed into law by President Biden last week, will infuse nearly $2 trillion into the economy to counter the effects of the past year’s COVID…
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Opinion Why are the Ultra-Orthodox treated like extremists when we vote?
Finally! The Ultra-Orthodox bloc has been defeated! Well, no one put it quite that way — at least not publicly — in January, when a lawsuit brought by the NAACP in the upstate community of East Ramapo was successful, and federal appeals court ruled that the voting method that had elected a majority Orthodox Jewish…
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Opinion The real reason so many Orthodox Jews voted for Trump
President-elect Biden received the most votes ever cast in a presidential election, surpassing the previous record set by Barack Obama in 2008. But soon-to-be-ex-President Donald Trump also won more votes than Obama ever did. Close to half the Americans who voted in the election did so for Donald Trump. Why? It’s something many Democrats are…
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Opinion ‘Blasphemy’ is non-halachic Jews name-calling Haredim
In her denial of a temporary restraining order to prevent Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s latest, onerous rules for “virus uptick areas” in several Orthodox-heavy neighborhoods, Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto of Federal District Court in Brooklyn posed a rhetorical question. “How,” she asked, “can we ignore the compelling state interest in protecting the health and life of…
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Opinion By treating Orthodox Jews as the enemy, Governor Cuomo made himself one.
On Tuesday morning, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo met with a group of Orthodox Jewish rabbis and community leaders. The meeting was intended to be, as Cuomo put it, a “good conversation” about the reasons he was placing restrictions on several New York City neighborhoods experiencing an uptick in positive cases of COVID-19. The governor…
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Fast Forward Why top Democrats oppose bipartisan bill targeting antisemitism in universities
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Fast Forward At least 4 New York City synagogues receive bomb threats on Saturday
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Opinion I’m an Israeli Columbia student. I never thought I’d be afraid to invite my parents to my graduation
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