Interviews and Profiles

"Rav Kook writes that it is literature which will awaken the spiritual sensitivities of mankind, when the writers of Israel undergo a process of inner purification and tshuva...When the Philip Roths and Norman Mailers stop hating themselves and their Jewish mothers, and sit for a few years in yeshiva, their books will bring mankind closer to God."

The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust, but the indifference of onlookers facilitated it. One of the guiltiest parties in this regard, according to a new book by former federal prosecutor Gregory Wallance, is the U.S. State Department. In the book, America’s Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR’s State Department, and the Moral Disgrace Of An American Aristocracy, Wallance quotes Treasury Department lawyers who accused State Department officials of being “accomplices of Hitler” and “war criminals in every sense of the term.”

New York State Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) is a candidate in New York’s 6th Congressional District in the June 26 Democratic primary. Lancman, who served as an officer in New York’s 42nd infantry division and as a local community board member, recently met with The Jewish Press Editorial Board. He addressed Israel and local issues.

Yeshiva University men’s basketball coach Jonathan Halpert now has his signature on the school’s men’s basketball court. The Coach Jonathan Halpert Scholarship Fund, an...

BEIT EL, ISRAEL – “Gush Katif number two.” “Another Amona.” “It will topple the government, split the nation, and drive an irrevocable wedge between the people and the leadership.”

Like clockwork, the question of school vouchers makes a prominent appearance whenever the media focus on a statewide election in New York, particularly one in a heavily Orthodox district. The latest chime was sounded during the battle between Lew Fidler and David Storobin to fill an open state senate seat; both promised constituents that they would make the fight for vouchers and tax education credits their priority.

Michael Widlanski grew up on the West Side of Manhattan. He went to Ramaz Yeshiva and then Columbia University, writing for both school newspapers, before landing a job at The New York Times. He also studied Arabic in college, traveling to Cairo to master the language – and learning to chant the Koran while he was at it. Partly motivating him was his desire, as a ba’al keriah, to learn how to properly pronounce the Hebrew letters ayin and chet. “The Arabs do it better,” he said. Presently, Widlanski is a professor at Bar-Ilan University after having taught Middle East politics and communications at Hebrew University for 20 years. Last month, he published his first book, Battle for Our Minds: Western Elites and the Terror Threat.

When Lee Terry began serving as a Republican congressman in 1999, representing Nebraska’s second congressional district, he didn’t realize he would become one of the House of Representatives’ Jewish members. Always a friend of Israel, Terry discovered his Jewish roots some ten years ago and began a personal odyssey to reconnect with his heritage.

Board-certified Miami plastic surgeon and Nose Job Specialist Michael Salzhauer surprised me. He forced me—an instinctive objector to vain mutilation for the sake of some notion of exterior beauty—to reconsider my views on this issue. And he's not cynical, that was another huge surprise. I walked away convinced he means every word he says.

Like other chassidic dynasties, Bobov was not immune to one day experiencing a schism. When Rabbi Naftali Zvi Halberstam, the fourth Bobover Rebbe, died in 2005, a dispute arose over who would succeed him. Some chassidim sought to appoint his younger half-brother, Rabbi Ben Zion Aryeh Leibish Halberstam, as the next rebbe; and others sought out the fourth rebbe’s sons-in-law: Rabbi Mordechai Dovid Unger as the rebbe, and Rabbi Yehoshua Rubin as the Bobov rav (serving as head of the bet din and as the posek).

This past summer, Israel made headlines for something other than the peace process or fighting terrorism when hundreds of thousands of its citizens took to the streets to protest social inequality and rising living costs.

If you asked someone to outline the profile of a director making a film on The New York Times’s coverage of the Holocaust, “non-Jewish,” “college student,” and “South Carolina native” would probably not be the first descriptors he would use. Yet, they perfectly fit the profile of Emily Harrold, a 21-year-old senior who is currently completing “Reporting on the Times,” a film inspired by Laurel Leff’s 2005 book, Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper.

The Second Intifada may have ended seven years ago, but countless Israelis injured during that harrowing period, and in the years since, continue to suffer.

An index of the Talmud with more than 6,000 topical and 27,000 subtopical entries is a major undertaking and its publication a seminal event in Jewish scholarship.

It’s not often that I get to speak to a rabbi about to celebrate his 99th birthday.

If the stars are aligned in his favor, attorney David Storobin will become the first immigrant from the former Soviet Union to serve as a New York state senator.

In September 2011, Forbes magazine ranked Sheldon Adelson the 8th richest man in America and 16th in the world.

Some people are naturals at visiting people in the hospital. Others feel awkward: What should I say? How long should I stay? Does the person even want me to come?

In September 2008, Miriam Rosenbaum, a freshman from New York City, arrived at Princeton University to begin her four years of undergraduate education on the Ivy League campus.

When Rabbi Henry Soussan went through training at Fort Jackson in 2002, area Jewish options were limited, and being able to participate in Jewish holiday celebrations was tough. Nearly 10 years later, the instructor at the Columbia, South Carolina installation’s chaplain school is proud of the Chabad-Lubavitch-run Aleph House, which gives civilians and soldiers a Jewish base while they’re away from home.

On Shabbos, November 19, Princeton University’s Miriam Rosenbaum made history by becoming the first Orthodox Jewish woman to win a Rhodes Scholarship. Roughly 1,500 Americans apply for the prestigious award each year, but only 32 ultimately receive it.

A nephew of Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik, zt”l, Rabbi Meiselman learned Torah on a daily basis with his uncle for more than a decade. Rabbi Meiselman has just finished writing a book (as yet untitled) on Torah and science due to be published in the next few months.

The Irgun is famous; Lehi – the other Jewish underground that fought the British in the 1940s – less so. With only 1,000 fighters, as opposed to the Irgun’s 5,000, Lehi is sometimes thought of as the Irgun’s “kid brother.”

I wasn’t sure if I should write something about the petira of Rebbetzin Kanievsky, z"tl. My first reaction was who am I to write about such a great person? How could I possibly describe who she was? She was so great that mere words cannot do her justice.

Cousin Leo Schreiber was the son of my grandfather's brother David. He came from a family of Rabbinic giants of Europe; the Europe that does not exist anymore. His family was loving and righteous and they were destroyed by Hitler, yimach shemo. But Leo survived.

Aside from being the first Orthodox Jewish layman to head the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (1982-1984), Rabbi Berman is also well known for the close relationship he shared with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (popularly called “the Rav”), who ordained him in 1959.

Rav Aharon Lichtenstein, a son-in-law and student of the legendary Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik – rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University for 45 years – is one of Modern Orthodoxy’s most prominent and respected personalities.

Laughter really is the best medicine. Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post and senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, has found humor and satire to be valuable tools in making the case for a strong Israel. Her latest venture to that end is Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website Glick created and edits.

WASHINGTON - Call Joe Lieberman the unlikely evangelist. The Independent senator from Connecticut - and the best-known Orthodox Jew in American politics - is probably more cognizant than most of his Jewish congressional colleagues about rabbinical interdictions against encouraging non-Jews to mimic Jewish ritual.

Rabbi Dr. Aaron Levine, z"l, passed away on the first day of Pesach, one day before his 65th birthday. He was an erudite scholar who had received semicha from the Rabbi Jacob Joseph Theological Seminary and a PhD in economics from New York University. He was equally at home in the world of Torah and in the secular world, and thus a unique combination of Torah and chochmah, something that is increasingly rare today. Furthermore, this intellectual prowess was clothed in a mantel of extreme humility.