Scholarship

What exactly did Rav Moshe Feinstein hold regarding our obligations toward secular law? Does Halakhah distinguish between the first forty days and afterward for gentiles? Michael Broyde responds to his critics.

Leead Staller argues for a more nuanced approach to euthanasia in Halakha.

Two letters to the editor provide alternative perspectives on the question of what Jewish law wants American abortion law to be.

Yaakov Taubes examines three hypothetical “What if?” books and what they can teach us about history, science, and halakhah.

In light of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday, Michael Broyde considers what American abortion law halakhah might prefer.

In his latest for the Lehrhaus, Steven Gotlib reviews the recently published collection of essays, Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith, which tries to answer: is there a philosophical defense of Orthodoxy in the modern world?

On this flag day, Moshe Kurtz surveys the arguments for and against displaying national flags in synagogues.

For Parshat Naso, Lehrhaus editor Yosef Lindell compares three twentieth-century rereadings of the Sotah ritual that make the passage more palatable to modern audiences.

Thanks in part to several new publications, portions of the Orthodox world have been engaging with modern biblical scholarship in a more significant way than ever before. Gil Perl provides a four-step framework for how Jewish days schools might profitably teach many aspects of biblical criticism that do not conflict with our mesorah.

Joshua Stadlan carefully explores the “blemishes” that invalidate a kohein for service in the Mishkan to argue that they were not an original part of God’s plan.