JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Read this article in Yiddish. Imagine a world in the not-so-distant future when most jobs in our economy will be replaced by machines; not just blue-collar workers like truck drivers and garbage collectors, but also accountants, bookkeepers, teachers, even doctors and lawyers. Let’s face it, the rapid transition to automation is going to happen because…
If you’ve spent any time in Jerusalem, you’ve seen these young men before. Sometimes, they appear in the Mamilla mall, ecstatic to be out on the town. You’ll see them on the public bus, or at a ‘mehadrin‘-kosher pizza shop, wearing identical black hats and holding the ubiquitous Israeli plastic bag. Finally, the Israeli TV…
In recently watching Neflix’s somewhat controversial yet highly compelling documentary, “One of Us,” which traces the path of three Hasidic Jews who leave the fold, I was struck by a particular observation made by Chani Getter, who is herself a counselor and former Hassid and the director of Footsteps, an organization that helps former Hasidim…
Noticing the black velvet yarmulke atop my dark brown hair, many of the students at my new school assumed that I was Muslim. In the beginning of my freshman year, I enrolled in Baltimore City College High School (“City”) in Baltimore, Maryland after attending ultra-Orthodox schools or “yeshivas” in Maryland for the prior 14 years….
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. S. Y. Stupnitsky, a forgotten twentieth-century Jewish journalist, made a prescient observation about the great historic Jewish structures in Europe: “Jews built them, and today non-Jews possess them.” Stupnitsky’s words certainly ring true about Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, the educational brainchild of Meir Shapiro, a Polish rabbi who…
An Orthodox community is in the midst of a philosophical crisis that’s pitting hard-line rationalists against New Age-leaning mystics — and the publication of a new book by a well-known rabbi has exposed and intensified the struggle. In his recently published “Alternative Medicine in Halakhah,” Lakewood, New Jersey rabbi Rephoel Szmerla gives Jewish legal justifications…
This originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. To read the previous chapter. “I’m available,” Leah said brightly. “Good,” he said, feeling an instant resistance to her enthusiasm. “I’ll see you at eight o’clock?” This time Yankel was able to borrow a different car. It was an almost-new Oldsmobile 98 Regency. “Beautiful car,” Leah said when he…
When I recently wrote my memoir of leaving ultra-Orthodoxy, I spent days ravaged by sobbing fits, debilitating chest pain, and migraines as I reencountered the trauma my 17-year-old self had experienced after I was pushed out of my yeshivish family for my rebellion. Shaken, I was fearful that when I went even further back to…
