America's Rabbi / Shmuley Boteach

Rabbi Schochet wrote the Johannesburg Beis Din: It is totally prohibited and unacceptable to hear someone like Boteach.

Are we to believe that these Jews who were devout and pious were being punished?

Several headlines recently caught my attention when I heard that a man who claims to have worked as Michael Jackson's bodyguard made the incredulous charge that Michael was a Nazi sympathizer. This kind of viciousness should usually not be indulged because it just gives it more credibility for the retelling. But the slander against Michael's name in this instance is so great that it deserves to be rebutted.

Is this what three thousand and three hundred years of Jewish tradition has come to, that a nation that has always dared to walk alone, with different ideals and values from the wider culture, should so fully capitulate to the most corrupt, misogynistic values, that we would advocate that our young women have plastic surgery in order to get married?

Challenging God in the face of suffering is not blasphemous.

Men ultimately fall in love with those women who bring out their best qualities.

Penn managed to sneak Ostreicher across a hostile border and into a safe and currently undisclosed location in the United States.

What can explain the "Shades of Grey" phenomenon? Why are so many married women reading about submission in an age of feminine liberation?

The Bible consists of 613 commandments, one of which is for a man to marry and have children, and the other is for a man to avoid gay sex with another man. That leaves 611 commandments for gay men to observe. That should keep them pretty busy. Homosexuality should be treated like lighting fire on the Sabbath or eating non-kosher foods, both Biblical prohibitions

In Israel, it’s easy to throw a recalcitrant husband in jail for refusing to grant a get. In the United States it’s much more challenging.

Forgetting how to hate can be just as damaging as forgetting how to love.

GoDaddy's Super Bowl spot was a disappointment for American culture and even more disappointing that it starred an Israeli icon.

How can anyone calling himself a Rabbi have the chutzpah to ever justify the death of innocents?

I have heard many Rabbis tell me that they don’t wish to dirty their hands by getting involved in political matters.

Twenty years, countless conversations, and hundreds of Friday night Shabbat dinners later, Cory today is a much-loved honorary member of the American Jewish community, regularly lecturing at Synagogues and Jewish conferences across the country. More significant, Cory has challenged the Jewish community to live up to its Biblical calling to serve as ‘a light unto the nations.’ In many of the speeches we deliver together he asks the Jewish participants if they study the weekly Parsha, if they honor the commandments, and cherish the Sabbath. What allows an African-American Christian Mayor to challenge Jewish leaders to deepen their Jewish commitment? Because those same leaders are amazed at Cory’s knowledge of Judaism and appreciation of the Jewish contribution to civilization. (Watch video)

Ordinarily, an attack by the political hack of one party about a mega-contributor to another party would not merit attention or comment. But what made Harris’s vitriol most unfortunate was that it was one Jew deriding the two foremost private supporters of Jewish identity and the State of Israel in the entire world.

Our government made a commitment to Iraq to return the collection once it's restored.

Mehmet, perhaps the world’s most famous Muslim who is not a head of state, is a righteous and proud Ambassador of his faith and feels an innate kinship and brotherhood with the Jewish people.

None of this is a criticism of Reform Jews who are my brothers in every way.

It’s rather a sign of how badly Israel is losing on campus.

In the time that I spent with Professor Benzion Netanyahu, I discerned a Jewish nationalist of phenomenal determination. Zionism was in his DNA and I have rarely met a more passionate Jewish patriot or a prouder Jew. He had a sweeping view of history and could clearly argue the precarious state of the Jewish people throughout time.

Time magazine's cover story about attachment parenting garnered a great deal of attention. Clearly, the shock value of showing an attractive young mother breast-feeding a child nearly four years of age was enough to excite worldwide conversation. The story inside focused on a controversial theory…

There are thousands of unqualified soferim in both America and Israel who sell items that, far from being first-rate, are not even kosher.

The gradual trickle of self-hatred into the Jewish soul is evidencing itself in the American Jewish public.

While Aref Assaf, President of the Arab American Forum in Paterson, New Jersey, might be forgiven for condemning my daughter’s service in the Israeli army, nothing can explain his defense of Congressman Bill Pascrell’s silence on the mass slaughter of Arabs in Syria.

The answer is an emphatic no.

Islam is undergoing a modern crisis which perhaps only its clerics and lay leaders can rescue it from.

The growing revelations that the Obama State Department watered down public statements on the attack in order to cleanse them of any mention of al Qaeda and terrorism is a travesty.

What is lost in the discussion are the Biblical underpinnings of abortion and how this is not primarily a legal issue but a religious one.

Aren’t we the nation that rebuilt Iraq and have done tons of nation-building in Afghanistan? Can’t we put the lights and heat back on New Jersey? Is it asking too much to bring a bunch of fuel tankers here and end the 100 vehicle long lines that are growing larger by the day? Just getting from point A to point B has been like navigating an labyrinth since the gas lines have cut off so many of the streets. President Obama declared this area to be a Federal Disaster Area. But where is FEMA? Where are the troops? Where are the gas tankers?