It’s hard to shed light on the circuitous debate surrounding the Haredi draft exemption, but Yosefa Fogel Wruble approaches the debate from the angle of another well-known “exemption”: that of women from many mitzvot, like Talmud Torah and certain time-caused commandments, which has contributed to an internal religious posture impacting the entirety of religious society. Can this parallel help explain Haredi society’s attitude toward draft exemption—and what might produce a shift?

You can't go home again—or can you? Tuvia Tenenbom left the insular streets of Bnei Brak for the bourgeois boulevards of Berlin. But he later decided to spend a year in Jerusalem within the cloistered and narrow alleyways of one of the city’s most reclusive Hasidic communities. Will they let him stay in their community? What will he find?  Ben Rothke review’s “Careful, Beauties Ahead!,” and shares the surprises he found in its pages.

As people live longer, questions about the decision-making process regarding care for the infirm and elderly have grown more prominent. A 2010 TRADITION essay by Judah Goldberg makes an invaluable contribution to our thinking on these matters. Yitzchak Blau shows how Goldberg's analysis touches on the nature of medical knowledge, the relationship between doctor and patient, the value of autonomy, and how formalistic halakha is.

With the arrival of October 7 we turn our minds back over the horrible year that has transpired. As we continue to pray for our soldiers and the immediate return of the remaining 101 hostages, revisit some of the material TRADITION has published aiming to help us make sense and find meaning in these events.

TRADITION 56:4 (Fall 2024) is wending its way to subscribers’ mailboxes in time for the upcoming holidays. Visit TraditionOnline to view the full table of contents for the issue and sample select open-access content particularly appropriate for the upcoming season: Neti Penstein on “Forgiveness: A Philosophical Analysis of the Halakhic Sources,” and Ari Schaffer reviewing two new books on the Etrog in halakha and botany, and in culture, history, and literature.

R. Shlomo Yosef Zevin (1890-1978) was universally recognized as one of the giants of Talmudic and halakhic scholarship. His iconoclastic combination of Haredi bone fides and Religious Zionism have made him the subject of great interest and no small amount of censorship. With the Jewish world’s ongoing wrestling with the exemption of Haredim from military service, R. Zevin’s 1948 essay “Regarding the Drafting of Yeshiva Students” has resurfaced as an object of interest. Read the English translation in the TRADITION Archives, and see how his questions and analysis are as germane today as they were at the State’s founding.