It sometimes happens that a word outlives its usefulness and has to be put out to pasture along with other terms like “Negro,” for example, or “Oriental.” Or maybe the preferable metaphor would be partial retirement. We can still appropriately use Oriental to refer to a rug but not to a person. I bring this…

Yesterday I wrote about the personal viciousness that issues from the Left in a way it doesn’t from the Right. This actually played a big role in the development of my own thinking, both religious (toward Orthodox Judaism) and political (toward conservatism). When I was a Brown University junior, I was picked to be an…

There are certain things we take for granted about Judaism that turn out not to be so. Like that Jews never proselytized. That they don’t have a mission to the world. And that, for another example, Judaism after the destruction of the Temple was forever after a totally decentralized affair. We never had anything remotely…

Good news: As I know from the weekly reports I get from Beliefnet, traffic on this still relatively new blog keeps going up. That’s heartening. Yet if you follow the comments box at all here you will have noticed something odd: this blog seems disproportionately popular with people who hate me and everything I stand…

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