Rabbi Avi Shafran
By Rabbi Avi Shafran
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Opinion What does Jewish tradition say about ‘Defund the Police’? It’s complicated.
In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police officer Derick Chauvin, a new cry has emerged from amidst the protests against racism and police brutality shaking the nation: Defund the Police. The cry means different things to different people, but in addition to addressing the fraught tensions between black communities and…
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Opinion We will cherish our shuls – and the homes that replaced them during this time
Previous Article Next Article I’m not into prognosticating (I’ve tried, to poor results) so I don’t feel confident making predictions about how our Jewish world will be different when we emerge from our figurative holes, hopefully soon. But I have, if not prophecies, then hopes. And they are predicated on what our collective confinement should,…
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Culture What all the critics of “Unorthodox” are forgetting
“Unorthodox” is, if anything, entirely orthodox. That is to say, the much-viewed and reviewed Netflix offering about a young woman who flees her insular hasidic community follows the typical convention of a number of books and documentaries portraying the ostensibly suffocating lives of hasidim and the quest of some of the braver souls among them…
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Community My four-page prize possession: an appreciation of the Novominsker Rebbe
When I went to bed on April 6, my mind was on the next day’s planned kashering of a kitchen sink and then that evening’s ritual search for chametz. When I awoke early the next morning, all of that was brutally pushed from my mind by the news of the Novominsker Rebbe’s unanticipated death. Mere…
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Opinion The media’s obsession with haredi wrongdoing exposes its bigotry
I wore a mask on Purim. Not a Mordechai or Esther mask, and not the face mask my wife and I wear when food shopping these days. It was the kind of simple dust mask I use when I mow the lawn. I used a felt marker to draw a large smile on the mask,…
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Opinion I’m an Orthodox man forced by coronavirus to pray at home. Will you join me?
Like most people with relatively normal lives, I enjoy being at home. My wife is there (at least when she’s not working), my bed is there, my chair, a well-stocked pantry, a kitchen that the missus sometimes lets me take over, a few adorable grandkids and their likewise adorable parents a few blocks away. But,…
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Opinion Don’t Let The Measles Epidemic Fuel a Jew-Hating One
If you live in New York – or anywhere, really – you will have recently been inundated with headlines about a measles outbreak, more often than not accompanied by a picture of Orthodox Jews. It’s true that an inordinate number of measles cases have in fact occurred in Orthodox communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County….
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Opinion Why Does The World Hate Haredi Jews?
A recent political ad from Israel compared ultra Orthodox Jews to terrorists. “It makes no difference if one is subjugated by someone with raised weapons,” the ad proclaims, to images of masked, ominous Hamas militiamen with mortars,“or by someone who isn’t prepared to raise a weapon.” Cue shots of a haredi Jew next to a…
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