Michael Lesher is an author (of poetry, fiction and non-fiction), a lawyer and an observant Jew who lives in Passaic, NJ. His most recent books are Sexual Abuse, Shonda and Concealment in Orthodox Jewish Communities (McFarland & Co., 2014) and Miracles (with Malky Feig) (Feldheim, 2017).
In his “History of the Jews,” the historian Paul Johnson coined the phrase “Non-Jewish Jew” for any Jew who, in his words, “denied there was such a thing as a Jew at all.” But it took Naftali Bennett and the Religious Zionist movement to trump the notion of the “Non-Jewish Jew” with that of racism…
Come on, folks. Since when is one actress’s discomfort about sharing a stage with Israel’s blood-stained prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, more newsworthy than the Israeli atrocities against Gaza that presumably spurred it? (And let’s face it, these are just the most recent horrors in Israel’s war on the 2 million inmates of the world’s largest…
Karl Marx famously wrote that when historic events recur, they appear “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” If Israel’s bloody conquest of East Jerusalem in 1967 (including the mass expulsion of Palestinians that followed it) was a tragedy, what can I call this latest chapter in the degradation of the place our…
Israeli behavior is the moral analog of Murphy’s Law. Just when you think the Jewish supremacists can’t get any more vulgar or more cynical, they somehow manage to find a new low. Take Avi Gabbay — the “liberal” opposition’s Netanyahu Lite. Gabbay celebrated his recent elevation to the leadership of Israel’s Labor Party with insults…
As you read these words, a new law is being hustled through Israel’s Knesset that would abolish all requirements for the teaching of a “core curriculum” in ultra-Orthodox Israeli schools, even those that are partly funded by the government itself. If the bill becomes law, many young Israelis educated in right-wing Orthodox yeshivot will learn…
On the eve of the June 1967 war, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook uttered the audacious (and unwittingly prophetic) lament that Israel did not yet rule over all the former Mandatory Palestine: “Have we forgotten those parts of Eretz Yisrael which are not in our hands? Where is our Jericho? And where is our Hevron? And…
The Brooklyn Hasidim accused of beating a young, gay black man named Taj Patterson back in 2013 are reportedly about to get a plea deal so sweet, they won’t serve a single day in prison. Patterson, who was beaten so badly that he was left blind in one eye, and who had homophobic slurs hurled…
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