Should I wear a kippa in today’s climate? This is a question being asked by many Jewish men. In this next installment of Moshe Kurtz’s new TraditionOnline series, “Unpacking the Iggerot,” we go back to the 1970s when many felt they could not cover their heads in the American workplace, and look at how R. Moshe Feinstein navigated a conflict between practical necessity and religious imperative with an eye on the long arc of how to best preserve halakhic integrity in American Orthodoxy.

In the mid-1960s R. Moshe Feinstein ruled that a microphone could be used for Megilla reading. In the first entry in our new “Unpacking the Iggerot” series, Moshe Kurtz addresses the implications of this decades-old ruling for issues that arose during COVID-19 and for our current post-pandemic era.

In this new TraditionOnline series, “Unpacking the Iggerot,” Moshe Kurtz explores the responsa of R. Moshe Feinstein zt”l, widely regarded as the posek ha-dor. By understanding R. Feinstein’s halakhic rulings the reader will be provided with a window into the overarching legal, philosophical, and policy considerations that poskim consider when addressing the pressing issues of their day.