Will President Barack Obama’s new Chief of Staff answer the President’s phone call on Shabbat? It would appear that the answer to that question will be yes (even though he’s Shomer Shabbos). Obama’s pick to succeed William Daley as his Chief of Staff is Jack Lew. Lew is currently a senior administration official who has…
Co-written by Rabbi Jason Miller and Rabbi Menachem Creditor Our colleague and teacher, Rabbi Steve Greenberg, is an Orthodox rabbi who will go down in history as being the first Orthodox rabbi to officiate a Jewish commitment ceremony and civil marriage for two men. In a recent article in The Jewish Week, Rabbi Greenberg explained…
As any man with a beard, goatee or mustache will tell you, it is a transformative experience to shave it all off. Something tells me that Matisyahu felt a sense of freedom after he shaved off his iconic beard the other day. There has been a lot of discussion about Matisyahu’s transformation after he came…
“All my life I’ve been waiting for… I’ve been praying for… The chance to shave off all this scraggly facial hair.” Those aren’t the lyrics to a Matisyahu song, but they could be. Only a few hours after the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) published my story about Matisyahu’s unimpressive appearance on a reality TV cooking show, they…
I try to keep up with the current events of the worldwide Jewish community. I read all of the major Jewish newspapers (or at least their websites). Therefore, I knew when Rabbi Natan Tzvi Finkel died on November 8 in Jerusalem. And yet, I admit I had never heard of him before. Rabbi Finkel was…
As a panelist for Jewish Values Online, I am asked to weigh in on various values-based questions from the perspective of a Conservative rabbi. A recent question I was asked to respond to was odd in that it wasn’t a question that had to do with values. I was asked to answer the difference between…
There were two funny things about the photos of Ivanka Trump (The Donald’s daughter) and her husband Jared Kushner taken in New York this past week. First is the fact that the well-to-do couple wouldn’t be using a fancy etrog holder. As Kushner was pushing their baby daughter Arabella Rose on the second day of…
Cross-posted to the Jewish Techs blog at The Jewish Week FaceGlat, the ultra-Orthodox social networking site, is an attempt to offer Haredi Jews the experience of Facebook without all the immodesty. From the opening page it reminds one of public restrooms with a sign for men to enter through one door and women to enter…
This has been anything but a quiet summer for Jewish news. The summer is usually a time when the Jewish world slows down, but not this year. It’s only mid-July and already it seems like there have been a dozen big news stories this summer. Here’s the list I compiled of news items either about the Jewish…