Free Republic

"And the two angels came to Sodom in the evening and Lot was sitting at the gate of Sodom." (From this week's Torah portion, Vayerah, Genesis 19:1) Hold on a minute! Didn't Lot learn anything from his previous misadventure? Just in last week's Torah portion, Abraham endangered himself and his entire family in a World War to save Lot from captivity after he made his bad decision to move to Sodom. After Abraham redeems him, Lot disregards everything that transpired and goes right back to Sin City as if nothing had happened, at all. In order to understand this psychosis,...

The Jewish community has been energetic lately in disciplining Jews who say the wrong thing about Israel. In January, the American Jewish Committee branded Jewish leftwing Israel critics as inciters of antisemitism. Meanwhile, when the Jewish anti-Zionists of Neturei Karta sent representatives to meet with Iran’s notorious president, Jews of all persuasions howled in outrage at the ultra-Orthodox eccentrics. Then there is Alan Dershowitz, with his tireless crusade against anti-Israel professor Norman Finkelstein. And so it goes. I’m taking a bit of a risk, then, in admitting here that—precisely because I’m an Orthodox Jew—I am not a Zionist. This is...

Since Betty Friedan's death I've found myself wishing that the cause I care about most had a voice like hers to speak for us. That cause is traditional Judaism — which, among many others things to recommend it, offers a wiser and ultimately more humane vision of womanhood than does feminism. Indeed, women under 45 or so have mostly seen through Friedan's idealization of work-outside-the-home as the necessary and sufficient condition of a meaningful life. But never mind that. I envy Friedan's singular gift as a revolutionary consciousness-raiser. Her book "The Feminine Mystique" initiated modern feminism. Today the Jewish world...