Rabbi Avi Shafran
By Rabbi Avi Shafran
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Opinion What We Can Learn From Trump’s Saudi Sword Dance
I don’t know about you, but until President Trump’s trip to the Middle East last month, I had never heard of a “sword dance.” Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, you’ll recall, were welcomed to Saudi Arabia at the Murabba Palace, near Riyadh, where they joined a lively group of Saudis clad in traditional…
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Opinion Friendly Fire: Why Do Some Fellow Jews Scorn The Ultra-Orthodox?
Among the responses to my critique of CNN’s Reza Aslan’s portrayal of Israeli haredim as a threat to the country, two stand out. One was public, civil and reasoned; the other private and, well, otherwise. The latter, from E. S. (he signed his full name), a self-described Conservative-turned-Reform Jew, characterized haredim as “an abominable blight…
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Opinion How CNN’s ‘Believer’ Smears Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox As Intolerant ‘Black Peril’
Reza Aslan, host of the modestly named “Believer With Reza Aslan” on CNN, has rendered his verdict: “ultra-Orthodox” Jews in Israel are to the Jewish state what the mullahs were to Iran in 1979. Sensationalism isn’t entirely unexpected from a presenter who, on the segment of his show dedicated to Hinduism, focused on a sect…
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Opinion Why I’m Not Bullish On ‘Fearless Girl’
For two decades, I’ve passed “Charging Bull,” the iconic bronze statue that stands near Wall Street, twice every workday when I walk from the Staten Island Ferry to my office in Manhattan. Now, I have to pass her too. I was never particularly fond of the beast, which always struck me as a bronze descendant…
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Opinion When Children Are Our Riches, We Prosper
It’s tempting to attribute the remarkable American Jewish demographic changes taking place to a simple matter of birthrates: Orthodox Jews tend to have many children, and non-Orthodox Jews fewer; some, none at all. A population like the non-Orthodox one, in which the average number of children per woman is fewer than 2.1, is below replacement…
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Opinion Actually, Jews Should Be Happy To See Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education
Forward contributing editor Jay Michaelson is acutely exercised over President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos to serve as the nation’s next Secretary of Education. Writing in these pages, he echoes teachers’ unions by sounding the alarm that DeVos, a school choice advocate, aims to destroy American public schools. Michaelson also asserts that “the agenda…
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Opinion You Don’t Have To Be a Zionist To Know UNESCO’s Temple Mount Resolution Is Insane
As a Haredi Jew with a non-Zionist perspective — that is to say, I do not consider the State of Israel to be the Third Jewish Commonwealth — I feel no compulsion to defend any position or move of any Israeli government. I am not a nationalist. I believe that only when the Messiah arrives…
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Letters Whatever Your Politics, You Shouldn’t Misrepresent Jewish Law’s Position on Abortion
To the Editor: Commenting on the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, Reform Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner is quoted in a June 27 JTA story reposted by the Forward as contending that “Jewish tradition teaches the importance of a woman’s ability to make her own healthcare decisions” and that Maimonides…
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