Jewish Thought and History

Malka Simkovich explores how Chazal approached our sacred texts in their midrashic allegories and how this issue continues to effect our approach to the torah today.

Zev Eleff examines some of the toys peddled around by mitzvah merchants and other fascinating features of Ultra-Orthodox culture. 

Elli Fischer contributes to the Lehrhaus Symposium on the recent OU statement regarding female clergy.

Tzvi Sinensky As chronicled in Robert Putnam’s 2000 classic book, Bowling Alone, loneliness is one of the vexing challenges of modern life. The advent of the...

Elinatan Kupferberg argues that the boundaries between Torah and Madda have blurred and evolved throughout Jewish intellectual history. This erudite analysis upends our assumptions about Torah u-Madda and breathtakingly reimagines its past, present, and future.

Those of us who feel deeply connected and indebted to Hasidism should ask ourselves a difficult and perhaps painful question: Is Netivot Shalom the sefer that we want to represent us to the rest of Am Yisrael?

Elli Fischer's thoughts on visiting the grave of Franz Rosenzweig, founder of the original Lehrhaus

Mitchell First reviews Yehuda Landy's Purim and the Persian Empire.

In a follow up to her recent piece about Joseph, Batya Hefter traces Judah's character development through the eyes of the Ishbitz-Radzyn masters.

In response to Gil Perl's Postmodern Orthodoxy, Gidon Rothstein asks for another look at Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and the limits of pluralism and what we consider "truth."