The yeshivah world and the community of Far Rockaway and the Five Towns find themselves in deep mourning after the petirah of the rosh yeshivah of the Yeshiva of Far Rockaway, Rav Yechiel Yitzchak Perr, at the end of last week. The Rosh Yeshivah, who was 89, placed his individual stamp on the world of Torah and mussar for decades and was a central figure in the establishment of Far Rockaway and the Five Towns as a community of bnei Torah and talmidei chachamim. The Rosh Yeshivah combined a number of disparate elements in his personal chinuch and in what he gave to his talmidim. A son and gra ..read more

University of Michigan graduate Benny Shaevsky, who was filmed last week being taunted by a pro-Hamas activist as he tore an illegal poster off one of the school’s buildings, courageously responded to her while defending the Jewish people. His actions received praise from people around the world, and he was interviewed by major media outlets, including Fox News. I spoke to Benny this past Sunday. Your confrontation with those pro-Hamas agitators at the University of Michigan has gone viral. The fact that you stood up to that woman was very heroic. Who was she? I don’t know her name, but I ca ..read more

I am happy to present to you part two of a series of questions and answers from former “Lunchbreak” interviewees. Readers sent in a considerable number of questions, and we couldn’t fit them all in one article; here we present the rest of the questions and answers from this select group of entrepreneurs. I appreciate the great feedback that I (and the featured entrepreneurs) received this past week, and I plan on putting together more such articles in the future, iy”H. —Nesanel I run a company with 14 employees, and I feel that we are all over the place in regard to task management. I know th ..read more

Did you hear? NPR is biased! Who—other than any mentally uncompromised listener to National Public Radio—knew? What made the non-revelation newsworthy of late was that an editor (now former editor) at the publicly-funded radio powerhouse dared to say the quiet part about NPR out loud. Uri Berliner, who has long worked as a senior business editor and reporter at NPR—and has a Peabody Award, a Loeb Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award, among others, under his journalistic belt—wrote a lengthy piece about his employer in the online medium The Free Press. In it, he offered his judgment that the netwo ..read more

Up until around five years ago, countless phones and paraphernalia would be scattered across the desk of Rav Amram Fried, one of the leading poskim of Bnei Brak. There would be five or six yungeleit sitting around him, answering the phones and listening to the various halachic queries that people posed to him nonstop. They would then repeat those shailos in condensed form to Rav Fried, who would then rule: “muttar,” “assur,” and so on and so forth. Rav Fried eventually found it an immense challenge to be answering the halachic inquiries by himself. Because people could call him at virtually a ..read more

The Biden administration has sharply intensified its campaign of pressure and criticism against Israel in recent days. Is US policy regarding the war changing in fundamental and significant ways? Has Biden abandoned the pro-Israel policy that he originally articulated months ago? In the first days following the October 7 pogrom, President Biden spoke out strongly in favor of Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas. In an interview with the CBS program “60 Minutes” on October 16, Biden was asked if he agreed with Israel that “Hamas must be eliminated entirely.” He replied: “Yes, I do.” The administr ..read more

Nothing is random. Within a time frame of a few weeks, I had a number of acquaintances from the UK tell me I should feature Yossi Gluck and his company Next Level Events. Yossi is an all-encompassing event planner who oversees high-end events from A-to-Z—or, as he says, “A-to-Zed.” Although high-end luxury events are commonplace in the US, they were rare in the UK until recently. But they are becoming more and more common there—thanks in part to Yossi and his team. While Yossi works with people with any budget, his meticulous attention to detail and talent for producing eye-pleasing events ha ..read more

It has been given the felicitous name “Sudden Russian Death Syndrome” by The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey. “It” being the seemingly long and ongoing chain of mysterious untimely demises of people who have been critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin or who have crossed him in some way. The proximate causes of the deaths have been poisonings, shootings, falls from windows and, in at least one case, a plane crash. What they all have in common are their suddenness and the victims’ having raised Mr. Putin’s ire. A recent victim of SRDS was Maksim Kuzminov, whose abrupt murder on February 13 in ..read more

A perfect storm of factors has put the threat of a draft of yeshivah bachurim front and center in Israeli politics. It may now be the issue on which the current government stands or falls. In 2017, the Israeli High Court ruled that the law exempting those learning Torah from the draft was illegal. Since then, the Knesset has been tasked with writing a new law to replace that one, but the attempts to do so have repeatedly failed. In June of last year, the government had to pass a resolution ordering the IDF to not draft yeshivah bachurim, after an interim law expired. But that resolution itsel ..read more

An iconic Orthodox Jewish-American politician passed away last week, leaving behind a legacy of historic achievements and political friendships across the aisle that are almost unheard of now. Above it all, his dedication to Yiddishkeit was such that he held fast to Torah and mitzvos even when in the highest positions of power. Joseph Isadore Lieberman served as the US senator for Connecticut for 24 years, as a Democrat , and he was the first Jewish person to be on a presidential ticket when he ran as the vice presidential pick of Al Gore in the election of 2004. Senator Lieberman, universall ..read more