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"Luke Ford reports all of the 'juicy' quotes, and has been doing it for years." (Marc B. Shapiro)
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff) LATEST POSTS:
- The Answered Letter: A Hero-System Essay on Philosopher Gary Chartier
- The Good Report
- I Watched Craig Van Rooyen Soar
- The Heaven He Could Reach With His Hands
- Liza by the Curb
- Bob Burge Draws The Line
- Chuck Evans and the Sacred Body
- The Boy Who Did the Right Things
- God Comes First, and Sports Comes Second
- The Sportswriter
- Live
- The Whole Cup
- Mulholland Drive
- Good Evening, Folks
- The Joe Starkey Hero System
- Mike Adamle and the Meaning of Heart
- Special Progress
- Amy Gutmann: A Life in Democratic Theory
- NYT: ‘Searching for Clues in Jeffrey Epstein’s Boyhood’
- Who Has Discussed Realist Anthropology in Polite Society?
BEST POSTS:
* American Epistemics (1-19-26)
* The Most Socially Toxic Inconvenient Truths (1-18-26)
* The Luke Ford Genre (1-18-26)
* The Filkins Pivot: Legacy Prestige and the Fracturing of the Chattering Class (1-16-26)
* Decoding The Trump Doctrine (1-4-26)
* If Tatiana Schlossberg were “Tatiana Smith” (12-30-25)
* ‘I’m So Trained’: How The Credential Society Burned Down the Palisades (12-28-25)
* Status Closure and The Lost Generation (12-25-25)
* The Bondi Massacre (12-15-25)
* Sydney Jews Learn That Their Aussie Social Contract Has Become A Suicide Pact (12-15-25)
* Terror in Sydney: Analyzing the “Chanukah by the Sea” Massacre (12-14-25)
* Decoding Nick Fuentes (11-2-25)
* The Landscape of Emotional Sobriety (10-29-30)
* The Rise & Fall Of Air Supply (10-19-25)
* No Kings, No Results: How Elite Pride Replaced Real Progress (10-19-25)
* You Are An Important Soldier In A Great War (9-7-25)
* The Revolt Of The Masses (8-31-25)
* The Covenant of Ashwood (8-24-25)
* If you can’t trust central bankers, then who can you trust? (8-23-25)
* Why Is The Elite Media Singing From The Same Hymnal About The Trump-Putin Summit? (8-17-25)
* Why Do Smart News Operations Sound So Uniformly Dumb So Often? (8-16-25)
* Nobody Is Coming (8-10-25)
* When Elites Restrict Our Speech, It’s Because They Love Truth, Freedom & Democracy (8-3-25)
Author Archives: Luke Ford
Lawrence Grossman and the Institutional Record of American Judaism
Lawrence Grossman stands among the scholar-editors who shaped the documentary record of postwar American Judaism from inside the institutions they studied. A native New Yorker, he earned his rabbinical ordination along with BA and MHL degrees from Yeshiva University and … Continue reading
The Chemist, the Professor, and the Giant
Marc Shapiro tells the gelatin story and lets one detail go by too fast. Louis Ginzberg (1873-1953), the great Talmudist at the Jewish Theological Seminary, ruled that gelatin is forbidden. He gave his reason without hedging. He knew R. Hayyim … Continue reading
True Defamation
Philosophy professor, attorney, and former journalist Jeff Helmreich (son of the late sociologist William B. Helmreich) writes in 2024: Holy Land was a thriving grocery chain in Minneapolis, owned and operated by a Palestinian American family. One of them, the … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro: Gelatin, Supposed Retractions, and Abraham Goldstein
Shapiro’s claim is about evidence and authority. A written responsum beats a remembered conversation, and the gelatin and dishwasher cases let him prove it twice. The dishwasher example is the cleanest piece of reasoning in the post. R. Moshe Feinstein … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro: R. Yudel Rosenberg, R. Mordechai Elefant, and Sexual Abuse
Marc B. Shapiro wrote a typical Seforim Blog grab-bag, and the title shows the strain. He yokes together a correction to his own forgery scholarship, a long meditation on Mordechai Elefant’s memoir, and a short note on rabbinic responses to … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro on Rabbinic Forgery
The strongest section is the first, on the phantom “A. Rosenberg.” Solomon Friedlaender forged a Yerushalmi to Kodashim, then invented a student, Rosenberg, to defend the forgery. The student praised the master. The master praised the student. Both were the … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro on the Chanukah Miracle
What the post does well is map a small scholarly territory. It groups the material by question. Etymology gets one cluster: Mitchell First on the spelling and meaning of Chashmonai and Maccabee, with Dan Rabinowitz on the same. The miracle … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro: ‘If this wasn’t so comical…’
Marc Shapiro (b. 1966) wins most of these exchanges, and he wins them on the simplest ground available: he tells the reader to look at the page. That move runs through the whole piece. Grossman charges him with citing Rivash … Continue reading
The Dissident Technocrat: William Luther Pierce and the Making of the Modern Radical Right
William Luther Pierce (1933-2002) was a principal ideological architect of the postwar American radical right. He tried to convert white nationalism from a scattered set of grievances into a complete political, cultural, and spiritual system. Earlier segregationists and populist reactionaries … Continue reading
Joseph Sobran and the Fragmentation of American Conservatism
Joseph Sobran (1946-2010) holds a singular place in the intellectual history of postwar American conservatism. He rose as a stylist of the first rank within the movement’s flagship press and ended as an exile from nearly every faction that had … Continue reading