Commentary

Elana Stein Hain Editor’s Note: We are running a number of pieces for the sheloshim of Professor David Weiss Halivni z"l. For Elli Fischer’s introduction...

Elli Fischer Just over a month ago, the Jewish world lost Rabbi Professor David Weiss Halivni, one of its greatest and most creative Talmudic minds...

Two letters to the editor provide alternative perspectives on the question of what Jewish law wants American abortion law to be.

Yaakov Taubes examines three hypothetical “What if?” books and what they can teach us about history, science, and halakhah.

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday, Michael Broyde considers what American abortion law halakhah might prefer.

In his latest for the Lehrhaus, Steven Gotlib reviews the recently published collection of essays, Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith, which tries to answer: is there a philosophical defense of Orthodoxy in the modern world?

As Juneteenth sparks another round of discussion of blacks and the American experience, Chaim Trachtman compares and contrasts the Jewish and Black experiences in America through the lens of Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book.

On this flag day, Moshe Kurtz surveys the arguments for and against displaying national flags in synagogues.

In this imaginative short story from David Zvi Kalman, as synagogue attendance shrinks, the buildings themselves begin to grow.

Thanks in part to several new publications, portions of the Orthodox world have been engaging with modern biblical scholarship in a more significant way than ever before. Gil Perl provides a four-step framework for how Jewish days schools might profitably teach many aspects of biblical criticism that do not conflict with our mesorah.