February 22, 2024
Exempting Haredi yeshiva students from military service generated contention already at Israel’s founding, but the current war has more powerfully brought this issue to the fore. In this installment of Alt+SHIFT, Yitzchak Blau outlines the background of this governmental policy, some of the many attempts to change it, and the impact this has had on Israeli society. The various reasons why this issue may be coming to a head right now should be obvious to reader.
February 20, 2024
Are the Seven Noahide Laws the parameters of an intended religion for Gentiles—or, as Yakov Nagen suggests, are they a means to rein in man’s destructive tendencies and preserve the world from obliteration? If murder corrupts all reality, as it did at the time of the Flood, and as it is now doing through Hamas and Hezbollah, how to these laws aim to serve as a corrective? Consider how the Noahide mitzvot join humanity into a stewardship that protects the fabric connecting human society with God, man, animal, and plant.
February 18, 2024
Yisroel Ben-Porat’s recent TRADITION essay offered an historical investigation of an enigmatic 18th-century figure, “Rabbi” Judah Monis—the first Jewish-born faculty member at Harvard, where he taught Hebrew for almost four decades. Monis converted in advance of his appointment, but seems to have maintained a complicated relationship with the Judaism he tried to leave behind. The Tradition Podcast spoke with Ben-Porat about this little-known chapter which opens very many questions about early (and contemporary) American Jewish identity.
February 15, 2024
In the long annals of TRADITION (and upon the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field), never have the words “Super Bowl” appeared. Chaim Strauchler introduces the phrase into one of these sacred canons to probe the moving lines between sports culture and religious stricture. Seeing the resilience of Orthodoxy’s connection to popular culture in a yeshiva’s Super Seder, Strauchler asks how rising antisemitism affects the community’s feelings of apartness and “a part”-ness in the sports arena and beyond.
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