Dear Editor, I know you run a newspaper for profit and I know you target a readership of a certain political mindset, but is there no way to introduce any balance into the political reportage. I am led to write this because of JTA’s Ron Kampeas’ recent article on the contretemps between the Center for American [ Read More...]

Rabbi Avi Shafran Contributing Columnist Back in 1961, a man named John Howard Griffin, a white native of Mansfield, Texas, published a remarkable book. “Black Like Me” was his account of six weeks of travel by bus across the deep south — as a black man, which he wasn’t. Two years earlier, Mr. Griffin, with [ Read More...]

Dear Editor, UNESCO omitted Israel from its latest five-year Science Report 2010, but UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova has pledged to AJC that an online chapter of Israeli scientific achievements will be posted on the web by the end of February.  The correction came about through AJC’s access to international leaders. This glaring omission occurred [ Read More...]

Rabbi Avi Shafran Contributing Columnist One hopes that readers here are not part of the population that peruses tabloids like the New York Post. If they were, though, they would have seen a recent opinion piece that called Jews “a small minority of the population… granted special privileges” who “wield power disproportionate to their numbers” [ Read More...]

Rabbi Avi Shafran Contributing Columnist First time visitors to the Shafran home quickly notice how odd it is. Its walls, that is. Well, what graces them, anyway. The dining room does sport a few normal things — a framed reproduction of a work of Hebrew micrography (a gift, many years ago, from some beloved students) [ Read More...]

Dear Editor, The article by Dr. Erika Brown was filled with inaccuracies, misinformation and slander. It did in words what a small, non-representative group did in actions, i.e. commit a desecration of God’s Name. Who are these Haredim that the author slanders, these vile people? Well, I guess it’s me and my kids. I have [ Read More...]

Rabbi Avi Shafran Contributing Columnist It was over a decade ago, in the wake of a spate of terrible terrorist attacks on Jews in Eretz Yisrael, that the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah called upon Jews to recite chapters of Tehillim (they suggested chapters 83, 130 and 142) in shul after davening, followed by the short prayer [ Read More...]

By Dr. Erica Brown Guest Editorial Jointmedia News Service I saw the recent photos of ultra-Orthodox Jews sending their children to a demonstration wearing yellow stars. We all saw those photos. I opened the New York Times with a silent prayer: “God, please don’t let one of those photos appear in these pages.” But my [ Read More...]

Rabbi Avi Shafran Contributing Columnist A recent essay by an award-winning scientist presents a remarkable, and remarkably revealing, picture of current scientific thought about the nature of the universe. The delightfully named Alan P. Lightman, an MIT professor and major contributor to the understanding of astrophysical processes, titled his piece in last month’s Harper’s Magazine [ Read More...]

Rabbi Avi Shafran Contributing Columnist One of the many downsides of a world that moves as quickly as ours is that many of us feel we must react to events in “real time” rather than after some research and thought. Leon Wieseltier once wisely remarked that the concept of such immediate reaction (he was speaking [ Read More...]