Archive for May, 2010

It is early in the morning, the Hampton air is still grey and soft with the end of night. The boardwalk, stretching along the beach’s edge, is empty. In front of me, the Atlantic Ocean rolls up, slapping the…

I push my way out when the pressure in my head becomes unbearable. There are voices, but I can’t really hear them. There is a lot of piety around me in this shul. Some of it is hopeful and…

We all love sex. We like it in the darkness of night when all we can hear are the strange house noises from electrical appliances, during broad daylight with the sounds of bustling crowds around us, or as the birds begin to chirp in the wee small hours of dawn. We like to vary...
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Chasidishkeit is not a way of life; it's a way of death. It manages to take everything exciting in life - food, sex, adventure, travel - and maul it, mangle it, distort it to a point where there's little left of their original allure. It has a particularly vicious stranglehold on sex. In high schools...
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I.

his hands were speckled in cheerful red polka dots
and Cain thought (just as he reached the end
of his psychonautical journey)
that he’d become a clown, a happy change
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Al Pacino, noted actor from the Godfather trilogy, showed up this week at a Borough Park synagogue to observe the prayers, and was later invited to the home of a local for some coffee and cheesecake.…

“Shechinala, Shechinala!” God called to the Holy Ghost with a sweet voice, and because he likes her, he said her name twice.

“What now?” came the impatient response.

“It’s been a long time since we…”

“I don’t care! I…

Portraying the inner workings of a religious community provides for ample camera material. Judgement was an episode on the BBC TV series Silent Witness back in 2008. A team of pathologists investigate a murder on our streets. Quite banal…

In June of 2003, I met with a writer for The Village Voice in a kosher café in Midtown Manhattan. Over a diet coke, with the writer’s recorder on the table between us, I spoke about my blog, my views on religion, and Chasidic society. I’d been hesitant, apprehensive about the inevitable publicity following...
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Another incident of Charedim in Mea Shearim getting angry about something or other and turning the streets into a war zone. This time it’s over the arrest of a Charedi organizer of violent protests in the…