KtBlog
Repent, Ye Wall Street
I do not normally look forward to Yom Kippur. It has always been, for me, a somewhat dutiful holiday, whereby the moral struggles of everyday life, as if they didn’t weigh heavily enough on us already, are magnified by lumping them into a year’s worth of sinful action and, by the magic of the ritual,…
For Every Life Saved
The last Yiddish writer. A story from the newest book to come out of KtB, Sweet Heaven When I Die.
A Debate Not for the Faint of Foreskin
Okay, here goes. Ready? The length of what follows should make this obvious: gird your loins. “Barefoot Intactivist,” from New York, wrote in last week about Gordon Haber’s ever-controversial essay “Uncovered” (see other discussions here and here): I applaud that you tried to approach this subject with logic, reasoning, and facts, but unfortunately you had…
Our Sons’ Willies
As expected, we’ve gotten a lot of mail about Gordon Haber’s circumcision essay, “Uncovered.” People get worked up about penises. Let’s start positive. Jessie Bennett, from Boston, writes: I’m just writing to say how grateful I was to read Gordon Haber’s completely sane, thoughtful piece on circumcision. It so closely mirrored my own thoughts on…
Black African Rabbi Aims High
Matthew Fishbane of Tablet magazine has a great two-part long piece of narrative journalism about the Abayudaya of Uganda, who have been Jewish since a colonial-era chieftain decided to follow the five books of Moses. A century later, a descendant of those African Jews became a rabbi and ran for parliament. Fishbane joined him on…
Shabbat and the Gospel Choir
There is exactly one day of the year when I make sure I get my ass to temple, and it’s not the day you’re thinking. Yom Kippur is too obvious and Rosh Hashanah is too mundane. But every year I go for the service commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr., the night where my synagogue acknowledges…
Aharon Friedman: Messiah Stopper
What’s stopping the Messiah from coming? It’s you, Jewish husbands who refuse to give your wives “gets” and thus create agunots—women who are legally divorced but cannot marry again in the Jewish faith—at least according to Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Washington. Regarding the refusal of Aharon Friedman, a Republican tax counsel on the House Ways…
What’s the Real Story of Hanukkah?
Our friends over at Obit are taking a super-revisionist approach to the Hanukkah story: Some time ago, a group of fanatics grew irritated and agitated by the lack of zeal demonstrated by some of their co-religionists, many of them wealthy and educated. A number of these non-zealots were assimilating at a fast pace into modern…
The Heart of Dixie in Jerusalem
What does college football have to do with the Holy Land? The University of Alabama’s Crimson Tide, the third-ranked Southeastern Conference team that just beat Duke 62 to 13, has an Arab Israeli fan in Jerusalem, I discovered on a walk between the Jewish and Christian quarters this summer. An Old City alley called Muristan tees off into…
