Michael Orbach
By Michael Orbach
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Culture Why a Good, Close Shave Is Like a False Messiah
It was either a cheap two-blade Bic or a generic Gillette knock-off razor. Given the almost pathological thriftiness my family had, I assume it was probably the cheaper option, whichever it was. I recall that when I saw the wall of razors at the drug store offering multiple blades and clean shaves, I realized that…
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Culture How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Be a Mensch
For about four years, I was a dedicated student in a yeshiva that eventually became a vacuum cleaner repair shop. Like many of my peers growing up in a Modern Orthodox neighborhood on Long Island, I went to a yeshiva in Israel after I graduated high school. That time was an unmitigated disaster; I spent…
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News Sex Abuse Witness May Have Been Paid To Testify
A landmark conviction of a prominent member of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox community for sexual abuse faces possible reversal following the indictment of man charged with having bribed a witness to testify against the abuser. On April 13, Samuel Kellner, 49, was arraigned in a Brooklyn court on multiple counts of grand larceny, perjury and criminal solicitation….
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News Cuba’s Remnant Rediscovers Religion
The hubbub surrounding Cuba’s small Jewish community these days does not faze Yakob Berezniak Hernandez. Sitting behind a desk crowded with a typewriter, several cans of Lieber’s tomato paste and piles of loose foreign change, Hernandez, of Havana’s Adath Israel synagogue, waved away inquiries about Alan Gross, the 61-year-old American Jewish contractor sentenced to 15…
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News Questions for Hikind at Rally for Victims
It was at the very end of his solidarity rally for Orthodox victims of sexual abuse that the tensions beneath the surface of Assembly member Dov Hikind’s approach to the problem boiled up. “When are you going to come out with the names of the murderers and molesters?” David Framowitz, an alleged victim of molestation…
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News Social Activism, Modern Orthodox-Style
It was a typical crowd for a Yeshiva University student event: long skirts and long sleeves for the girls, yarmulkes and tzitzis for the boys. But the January lecture featured no rabbi. And the topic was hardly typical Torah fare. Behind a lectern decorated with the university’s blue flag, Barry Gibbs, a burly Jewish Vietnam…
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News Reclusive Syrian Jews Denounce Hebron Eviction
The recent eviction of Israeli Jewish settlers from a contested building in Hebron has provoked a loud and angry retort from the usually publicity-shy Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn. In a December 17 gathering that attracted some 300 Syrian Jews, including the community’s leading rabbis, speakers rallied around one of their own: a local women’s…
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