JewsByChoice.Org

Happy Chanukah Everybody!

My rabbi is not a great scholar and he’d be the first to admit it. (Let me just say right off that he is no slouch either. He knows his way around the Torah, the Talmud, and the Shulchan Aruch well enough to guide me and the rest of his congregants pretty well.) He comes [...]

[Please forgive the gender chauvinism, but it’s just easier for me to use the masculine form in writing. Please know that everything in this post goes for women as well.]
Hanging around the Chabadniks I’ve had a lot of exposure to the Tanya, Lubavitch Chasidism’s central text of chassidus written by Chabad’s founder Schneur Zalman of [...]

Read Part One here.
My last post about my little shul was a litany of criticisms, all valid and true, about Chabad-Lubavitch in particular and the black-hat world in general. I ended that post with the question: if I feel that way about them, how can I affiliate with them? I am now going to [...]

Just a quick post to share two books that I’ve read recently and really enjoyed. Both are histories, (I love history), extremely well written and compelling.
The first is Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll. It is a history of the interaction between Judaism and Christianity, but mostly Judaism and the Catholic Church. The author is a [...]