- https://PayPal.Me/lukeisback
"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:
- Dennis Prager v Cedars-Sinai Lawsuit
- Dennis Prager Through Randall Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
- What is a ‘Received Idea’?
- Jordan Bardella: The Manufacture of Normality
- Everyone Became Television: Bourdieu’s Warning and the 2026 Iran War
- Marine Le Pen
- The Coalition-Proximity Rule
- Nigel Farage
- Bernard Haykel: A Life Between the Text and the Gun
- Walker Connor (1926-2017)
- Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination
- Anthony D. Smith: The Student Who Kept the Question and Rejected the Answer
- Ernest Gellner
- Eric Kaufmann: The Man Who Made the Majority Visible
- Dominic Cummings: A Biography
- Steve Lopez: The Last City Columnist
- California Historian Kevin Starr
- Stephen Kotkin: A Life in Power
- William T. Vollmann: An American Life in Excess
- Rod Dreher: A Life in Exile
BEST POSTS:
- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
* The City of Private Rooms (5-25-26)
Category Archives: R. Aviad Hollander
The Question MO Will Not Ask
Do you accept historicism (that everything is a product of a time and place)? If not, on what grounds? The question is simple to state. It is difficult to answer. It is the question Modern Orthodox scholarship will not ask, … Continue reading
Posted in Marc B. Shapiro, Modern Orthodox, R. Aviad Hollander, R. Shlomo Goren
Comments Off on The Question MO Will Not Ask
What Hollander Does Not Say: Pinsof’s Frame and the Coalitional Silences of a Religious Zionist Sociologist
David Pinsof’s essay “A Big Misunderstanding” attacks intellectuals who diagnose social pathologies as misunderstandings. The classic move: people are biased, ignorant, propagandized; the intellectual brings clarity; the problem dissolves once the diagnosis spreads. R. Aviad Hollander is not the intellectual … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander
Comments Off on What Hollander Does Not Say: Pinsof’s Frame and the Coalitional Silences of a Religious Zionist Sociologist
Strange Bedfellows in the Beit Midrash: Coalition Politics in Sperber’s Project and Hollander’s Analysis
David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie G. Haselton’s “Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems” gives the reader the tools to see what Hollander cannot see and what Sperber cannot afford to admit. The framework is simple. … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander, R. Daniel Sperber
Comments Off on Strange Bedfellows in the Beit Midrash: Coalition Politics in Sperber’s Project and Hollander’s Analysis
Convenient Beliefs in the Halakhic Beit Midrash: Sperber, Hollander, and the Sociology of What Cannot Be Said
Applying Stephen Turner’s frame of convenient beliefs to the Daniel Sperber controversy yields reinterprets a beit midrash that has become methodologically aware of itself. Convenient beliefs, in Turner’s account, are the beliefs that survive within a profession because holding them … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander, R. Daniel Sperber
Comments Off on Convenient Beliefs in the Halakhic Beit Midrash: Sperber, Hollander, and the Sociology of What Cannot Be Said
The Humanistic Halakha and the Crisis of Rabbinic Authority: On Aviad Hollander’s Study of Daniel Sperber
R. Aviad Hollander’s study of Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber’s (b. 1940) halakhic methodology, “The Humanistic Halakha: Clarifying the Nature of Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber’s Approach to Halakha,” recognizes that the contemporary crisis of halakhic authority is about power as expressed … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander, R. Daniel Sperber
Comments Off on The Humanistic Halakha and the Crisis of Rabbinic Authority: On Aviad Hollander’s Study of Daniel Sperber
‘Zionist-Messianic Halakha’
Aviad Hollander’s chapter “Zionist-Messianic Halakha” reconstructs Rabbi Shlomo Goren (1917-1994) as a theorist of sovereign Jewish existence. Hollander shows that Goren’s halakhic rulings emerge from a theology of history. The establishment of the State of Israel constitutes for Goren a … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander, R. Shlomo Goren
Comments Off on ‘Zionist-Messianic Halakha’
Halachic Multiculturalism and the Crisis of the People’s Army: Women’s Singing, Sovereignty, and Jurisprudential Transformation in the IDF
Aviad Yehiel Hollander’s 2014 article, “Halachic Multiculturalism in the IDF: Rulings of Official Religious Authorities in Israel Concerning ‘Women’s Singing,’” remains an indispensable analysis of the evolving relationship among halacha, military sovereignty, and multicultural governance in the State of Israel. … Continue reading
Posted in IDF, R. Aviad Hollander
Comments Off on Halachic Multiculturalism and the Crisis of the People’s Army: Women’s Singing, Sovereignty, and Jurisprudential Transformation in the IDF
‘Danger, Slippery Slope!’
R. Aviad Hollander’s essay “סכנה, מדרון חלקלק!” (“Danger, Slippery Slope!”) exposes the structural tensions the return of Jewish sovereignty generates. At first glance, the essay seems to address a familiar controversy inside contemporary Religious Zionism: the integration of women into … Continue reading
Posted in IDF, R. Aviad Hollander, R. Shlomo Goren
Comments Off on ‘Danger, Slippery Slope!’
Rabbi Eliezer and the Governance of Reproduction: Sexual Discipline, Porous Anthropology, and Covenantal Survival in Late Antique Rabbinic Judaism
A review essay on Yitzchak Roness and Aviad Yehiel Hollander, “How Shall the Children Be Beautiful: Rabbi Eliezer and Eugenics in the Eyes of the Sages,” Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal 10 (2012): 25–44. The testimony of Imma Shalom (fl. … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander, Talmud
Comments Off on Rabbi Eliezer and the Governance of Reproduction: Sexual Discipline, Porous Anthropology, and Covenantal Survival in Late Antique Rabbinic Judaism
The Bounded Sovereign: Eglah Arufah and the Architecture of Delegated Responsibility
Few of the Torah’s legal and ritual institutions rival eglah arufah for conceptual strangeness or political suggestion. Deuteronomy 21 describes the rite. A corpse turns up in an open field. The murderer is unknown. The elders of the nearest city … Continue reading
Posted in R. Aviad Hollander
Comments Off on The Bounded Sovereign: Eglah Arufah and the Architecture of Delegated Responsibility