Commentary

In honor of Flag Day, Michael Bernstein argues that national flags do not belong in our shul sanctuaries. Drawing on halakhic responsa, news reports, and photographic evidence, Bernstein locates the practice of displaying flags in shuls in its historical context and proposes that flags do not ever belong in prayer spaces.

Jonah Rocheeld reflects on the state of Modern Orthodoxy and the ways Modern Orthodoxy has removed emotionality from religious practice in pursuit of rationality.

Max Hollanders compares the theological issues raised by alien life and AI.

Jared Rutner explores Rabbi Sacks’s economic views.

Joseph Feit outlines a dimension of the topic of artificial intelligence and Halakha, emphasizing the lack of perception inherent in artificial intelligence.

Haim Watzman's short story, which previously appeared in Hebrew in the National Library of Israel's literary magazine, explores the grief and confusion of wartime in Jerusalem.

In this review, Garry Wayland explores Rabbi Joshua Berman's new "Echoes of Egypt" Haggadah, which incorporates aspects of ancient Egyptian history.

In this review, Chesky Kopel juxtaposes three new poetry books which illustrate today's trials and tribulations: Tikvah Hecht's "Tashlikh," Brian Rohr's "Shaken to my Bones: A Poetic Midrash on the Torah," and Eden Pearlstein's "Nothing is for Everyone."

The exhaustive Talmud commentary of Provencal scholar Menachem ben Shlomo Ha-Meiri was largely disregarded by Jewish scholars for centuries. Its revived popularity in the twentieth century presents a puzzle, then, for which multiple explanations have been offered. Michael Broyde considers the approaches advanced by his teacher Dr. Haym Soloveitchik and by others, before proposing his own explanation, focusing on Meiri's unique level of access to and use of Yerushalmi texts.

Organizations advocating for Jewish renewal in Israel have become increasingly popular in the last decade, seeking to transcend the religious-secular divide and articulate a vision of Jewish civilization as a shared identity. David Sperber explores the ways that these organizations effectively seek to recreate models that have already long existed in non-Orthodox denominations, but to wrap them in the idioms and culture of Orthodoxy. He argues that failure to recognize the non-Orthodox contributions is unjustified and hopes that Israeli society can grow to "recognize renewal wherever it has taken root."