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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:
- After the Kings: Ben Fordham and the Remaking of 2GB Breakfast
- The Entertainer’s Exemption: John Laws and the Price of Trust
- What the Record Shows: David Marr and the Uses of Evidence
- Peopling the Emptiness: The Life of Patrick White
- Crossing Lines: Nick McKenzie and the Limits of Method
- Australian Investigative Journalist Chris Masters: The Man Who Saw In
- The Unwinder: George Packer and the Study of American Decline
- Thomas Edsall: The Reporter Who Treated Politics as a System
- Ross Douthat and the Persistence of Belief
- Joseph Kahn and the Stewardship of The New York Times
- The Institutionalist: Dean Baquet and the Remaking of American Journalism
- The Publisher Always Wins – A Jill Abramson Biography
- Howard Zinn – The Historian Who Took Sides
- Linton Besser: A Reporter and the Paper Trail
- Gerald Stone and the Making of Australian Current Affairs
- Paul Barry: A Chronicler of Australian Power
- The Dean of Revolutionary Scholarship: Gordon S. Wood, 1933-2026
- The Last Generalist: Bob Ellis and Australian Public Life
- WEHT to Investigative Journalism?
- The Genius Myth: The Dangerous Allure of Rebels, Monsters and Rule-Breakers
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)
Category Archives: Marc B. Shapiro
Saudi Arabia Is Not A Theocracy
Historian Marc B. Shapiro blogs: Saudi Arabia is not a theocracy. When the State was established there was no automatic assumption that the status quo in all religious matters would carry on (see R. Herzog’s constitution and the correspondence published … Continue reading
Stoning Sabbath Violaters
Historian Marc B. Shapiro blogs: R. Moshe Eisemann, who used to have a great deal of influence in the moderate haredi camp, wrote as follows with reference to the Jerusalem fanatics who throw stones at passing cars (not knowing, of … Continue reading
Forcing Israelis To Have A Religious Wedding
Historian Marc B. Shapiro blogs: It was actually the Religious Zionists who were responsible for creating the undemocratic situation in which Israel is perhaps the only country in the world in which Jews are not free to be married by … Continue reading
Should A Religious Jew Save The Life Of A Non-Religious Jew?
Historian Marc B. Shapiro blogs: Here is another responsum, by R. Israel David Harfenes, Nishmat Shabbat, vol. 5 no. 500:4. The author is asked if you can violate Shabbat to save the lives of irreligious Jews who came from the … Continue reading
How Do The Haredim Feel About The Non-Haredim?
Historian Marc B. Shapiro blogs: One of the leaders of the extremist haredim is R. Moshe Sternbuch. Here is the first page of a responsum he wrote (Teshuvot ve-Hanhagot, vol. 1, no. 816) in which he states that if a … Continue reading
What Would A Haredi Israel Look Like?
Historian Marc B. Shapiro blogs: I can’t speak about the haredi man on the street, but examination of the writings of the haredi leadership – and in the haredi world that is what really matters – shows that time and … Continue reading
Distorting Jewish History
Historian Marc B. Shapiro writes: “While the examples Horowitz discussed are motivated by a Victorian style of writing, the example I give is probably motivated by a desire to shield the masses from the knowledge that even in pre-Reform Europe … Continue reading
Were The Africans Unattractive?
According to Wikipedia: “The word Cushi, also spelled Kushi (Hebrew: כושי) is a Hebrew term generally used to refer to a dark skinned person usually of African descent and was recently interpreted as being similar in meaning to the English … Continue reading
The Jews Of Palermo
Historian Marc B. Shapiro writes: “Note how R. Ovadiah testifies that while the Jews in Palermo were careful about not drinking non-Jewish wine, which was noteworthy since elsewhere in Italy Jews routinely consumed this, their sexual morality and observance of … Continue reading
When Is It Kosher To Forge?
Throughout my life, I’ve noticed that otherwise righteous people are willing to lie if they think it can do good. Historian Marc B. Shapiro writes: “If you are convinced of the correctness of your position, it is not hard to … Continue reading