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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:
- 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
- When Radio Hosts Transition To Podcasts
- The Jeremy Paxman Voice
- The David Dimbleby Voice
- The Krishnan Guru-Murthy Voice
- The Voice of Lyse Doucet (BBC World News)
- The Voice of Yalda Hakim (Sky News)
- The Yves Montand Voice
- The Voice of BBC Newsreader Clive Myrie
- The Tom Bradby Voice (ITV Newsreader)
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
When the Tacit Cannot Stay Tacit: Turner, Shapiro, and the Crisis of Mosaic Authorship
Maimonides’ Principle 8 is an essentialist articulation imposed on a tradition whose operations were tacit. Stephen Turner’s framework, which attacks essentialism in social theory and treats tacit knowledge claims with skepticism, lets us see the move Maimonides made and the … Continue reading
The Boundary at Sinai: Principle 8 as Coalition Technology
Principle eight is the live wire of Orthodox theology today, and Shapiro’s chapter on it is the most explosive in his 2011 book, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised. The Principle holds three claims at once. The … Continue reading
Reappraised: The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised (2011)
Marc Shapiro’s The Limits of Orthodox Theology is a book about a coalition document that does not know it is a coalition document. Shapiro’s argument runs at the level of doctrine and historical scholarship. The thirteen propositions Maimonides put forward … Continue reading
The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised (2011)
The book demands a Stephen Turner tacit knowledge frame. Here’s why, with the others slotting in underneath. Marc Shapiro’s argument structure runs like this. Maimonides articulates thirteen propositions as the explicit content of Jewish belief. The subsequent tradition accepts the … Continue reading
‘Saul Lieberman and his Ketubah’
Marc B. Shapiro writes: Lieberman begins by saying that he had not written to R. Herzog—who was a very close friend[3]—because he did not want to create difficulties for R. Herzog by bringing him into the controversy swirling around his … Continue reading
‘Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch on Jews in a Non-Jewish World’
This is a small but useful document for understanding the world Rabbi Jehiel Yaakov Weinberg entered when he moved to Berlin and took over the Hildesheimer Seminary. Hirsch is the founder of the tradition Weinberg eventually defends, and the essay … Continue reading
Remnants of the Fire: The Intellectual Life of Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg
Here is Marc Shapiro’s 1995 PhD thesis at Harvard on Rabbi Weinberg. Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg is born in 1884 in Ciechanowiec, a small town then under Russian rule. He shows talent early. By his teens he studies at the great … Continue reading
Between Zakhor and the Editor’s Desk: What Yerushalmi and Shapiro Reveal About David N. Myers
In 1980, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932–2009), a professor of Jewish history at Columbia University, gave four lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle that became the 1982 book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. The work rests on a … Continue reading
What Then Shall We Do: The Work Shapiro Left
Marc B. Shapiro has shown, with names, editions, footnotes, and before-and-after texts, that Orthodoxy actively manages its own past in order to present itself as unchanging. The Limits of Orthodox Theology (2004) demonstrated that Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles were never the … Continue reading
The Archivist’s Paradox: Marc B. Shapiro and the Layers of Managed Disclosure
The previous essays in this series examined Marc B. Shapiro from three angles. The first described what he does: destabilizing the myth of Orthodox uniformity while preventing any clean new myth from forming. The second placed him inside the “quality … Continue reading