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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:
- Edward Wadie Said (1935-2003)
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
- Fredric Jameson
- Homi K. Bhabha
- Howard Lutnick and the Two Terrors
- Full Faith and Credit
- The Conquest of the Creature
- The Index of His Father
- The Hero System That Says Its Name: Moshe Hillel Hirsch and the Greatness of Man
- Who Keeps the People Alive: A Hero-System Essay on Rabbi Dov Lando
- The Man Who Priced The Long Run
- The Return
- Redemption Has an Address: The Hero System of Bezalel Smotrich
- Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Two Terrors
- Razin Caine and the Quiet He Cannot Keep
- Pete Hegseth and the Sacred Word
- The Bridge and the Hammer
- The Hero System of Bernie Sanders
- The Advance Man
- The Deniable Man: David Barnea and the Two Terrors
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
‘Dual Loyalty to Halakha and the State: Rabbi Goren’s Ruling as a Test Case’ (2015)
Aviad Hollander’s essay about halakhic decision-making in the Religious Zionist world is also an inquiry into the constitutional and theological crises generated by modern Jewish sovereignty: can Halakha function as the governing moral and legal language of a modern democratic … Continue reading
‘National Movements and International Law: Rabbi Shlomo Goren’s Understanding of International Law’ (2014)
The intellectual significance of Rabbi Shlomo Goren lies not simply in his attempt to reconcile Halacha with modern international law, but in the much larger civilizational problem his work confronted: the reconstruction of a sovereign Jewish jurisprudence after nearly two … Continue reading
‘The Relationship Between Halakhic Decisors and their Peers as a Determining Factor in the Acceptance of their Decisions – A Step in Understanding Interpeer Effects in Halakhic Discourse’ (2010)
Aviad Hollander’s paper is ostensibly a contribution to the sociology of halakhic decision-making, yet the essay’s true significance extends well beyond the relatively narrow problem it formally addresses. Beneath its careful comparison of two twentieth-century rabbinic controversies lies a broader … Continue reading
The Temple Mount and the Jurisprudence of Sovereignty: Religious Zionism, Halakhic Transformation, and the Reconstruction of Sacred Space
Contemporary journalism describes the struggle over the Temple Mount in flattened terms: nationalism, religion, archaeology, security. Such descriptions catch fragments and miss the transformation unfolding beneath the surface. The modern Temple Mount controversy presents a jurisprudential and civilizational crisis born … Continue reading
Do My Deflationary Frames Move Me Along The Buffered vs Porous Axis?
My favorite AI chatbots say: The buffered self believes it sees the social world from outside. It treats coalitions, status games, and convenient beliefs as features of other people’s lives. It stands at the analytical desk, sovereign and uncaptured. When … Continue reading
Stephen P. Turner Against Essentialism: Iran, the IRGC, and the Evolutionary Sociology of Institutions
Much contemporary commentary on the Islamic Republic of Iran suffers from conceptual instability. Analysts oscillate between two inadequate explanatory frameworks. On one side lies a naïve voluntarism that treats all political actors as indefinitely malleable and assumes that sufficient diplomatic … Continue reading
‘The Halakhic Profile of Rabbi Shlomo Goren: Studies in the Adjudicatory Deliberations and Modes of Substantiation in his Halakhic Writings’
Aviad (Yehiel) Hollander completes his PhD dissertation in 2011 at at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Talmud: “The Halakhic Profile of Rabbi Shlomo Goren: Studies in the Adjudicatory Deliberations and Modes of Substantiation in his Halakhic Writings.” The work examines how … Continue reading
The Prophet as Architect: An Intellectual Biography of Ellen G. White
Ellen G. White (1827-1915) does not fit standard categories of intellectual life. She wrote no treatises in the manner of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). She built no systematic theology in the German tradition. She had three years of formal schooling. Yet … Continue reading
‘In the Eye of the Storm: The Public Persona and Torah Work of Rabbi Shlomo Goren in the Years 1948-1994’
This is Shifra Mishloff’s 2010 Bar-Ilan doctoral dissertation consisting of 265 pages in Hebrew, submitted Tammuz 5770, advised by Prof. Meir Hildesheimer of the Kushitzky Department of Jewish History. From the acknowledgements, Mishloff got access to Goren’s (1917-1994) personal archive … Continue reading
Elizabeth S. Anderson and the Recovery of Relational Equality
Elizabeth S. Anderson (b. 1959) holds the John Dewey Distinguished University Professorship of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, with a courtesy appointment as Professor of Law. She has taught there since 1987, the year … Continue reading