Double Lifers
In 2006, a blogger known as Baal Habos posted about a former rebbe who had once compared heretical media to “a hole in the head.” By then he had become a “ba’al ha-bos” (roughly, a family man), with a position in the community he wasn’t comfortable giving up, he had acquired plenty of holes in his head and wanted to discuss them—anonymously.
If God Wills It, a Broom Can Shoot
“Are you really intending to raise our kids,” my wife Tali asked me one Saturday afternoon after our Shabbes lunch, “in a world that doesn’t have Harry Potter in Yiddish?”
Lives in Translation
The elegant essays in Hillel Halkin's new book are the fruit of a lifetime devoted to Hebrew literature.
Spinoza in Warsaw: Fragments of a Dream
“Having rested in his grave for 250 years, Baruch Spinoza came to the conclusion that just lying around like that was without telos” and decided to try to make it in Warsaw. A Yiddish satire, translated and with an introduction by Allan Nadler.
“We Found Our Outrage”
On March 2, 2015, a handful of campus activists announced that Andrew Pessin was an anti-Palestinian bigot. “I feel unsafe,” wrote Lamiya Khandaker, the student chair of diversity and equity at Connecticut College.
The First Amendment and the Vocabulary of Freedom
Oral arguments in a case involving two Catholic schools sometimes sounded less like a jurisprudential clash over the First Amendment than a synagogue kiddush.
Friendship in the Fields of Moab
Naomi and Ruth have mourned together and are now setting off on the 50-mile journey from the plains of Moab to Bethlehem, toward an uncertain future—alone but side by side.
Could It Have Happened Here? The Implausible Plotting of The Plot Against America
Was America in 1940 primed for an antisemitic leader, as Roth and his adapters would have us believe?
Beauty within Beauty: How Lag BaOmer Stopped a Plague
“One cannot, says Hasidism, have to do essentially with God if one does not have to do essentially with men.”
My Scandalous Rejection of Unorthodox
All of us in the online OTD community have gone through some version of the transformation Unorthodox dramatizes, and we gobble down and fiercely debate every new OTD memoir that hits the shelves, every documentary and movie that comes out.