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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 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
- 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)
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
Of Books And Bans
Marc B. Shapiro writes in 2002: At the end of 2002, within the space of a few months, Orthodox Jewry witnessed something very unusual. With great publicity two books were placed under a ban: Nathan Kamenetsky’s Making of a Godol1 … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro On Rav Shach
In 2008, Marc Shapiro emails the Daas Torah blog: * I would like to clarify my [1993 email] posting about Rav Shach. In fact I actually hinted to this in my first sentence (if I remember correctly). What I wrote … Continue reading
Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer’s Program of Torah u-Madda
Marc B. Shapiro writes circa 2000: Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer (1820-1899) was, together with Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the pioneer of Torah im Derekh Erez in modern times. Although each of them understood this concept differently, with Hildesheimer advocating Orthodox Wissenschaft … Continue reading
Torah im Derekh Ereẓ in the Shadow of Hitler
Marc B. Shapiro writes circa 2006: With the coming to power of the Nazi regime, and the governmental determination to remove Jews from all aspects of German culture and public life, Torah im Derekh Erez took another hit. Here was … Continue reading
Suicide and the World-to-Come
Marc B. Shapiro writes in 1993: In 1880 the Jewish community of Iraq was forced to confront a sharp increase in antisemitic persecution. Not all of the country’s Jews were prepared for this new phenomenon and the result was a … Continue reading
Tradition in Transition: Orthodoxy, Halakhah, and the Boundaries of Modern Jewish Identity
Marc B. Shapiro writes circa 1992: Hildesheimer came down firmly on the side of Orthodoxy. In his mind, Frankel, Graetz, and other professors at Breslau were heretics. Not only was Frankel a meshumad—which made him even worse than an apikores—but … Continue reading
RABBI DAVID TSEVI HOFFMANN ON ORTHODOX INVOLVEMENT WITH THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY
Marc B. Shapiro writes in 1999: When, in the early 1920’s, serious planning for a Jewish University in Jerusalem got underway, the Orthodox community was put into a quandary. The notion of a university in Jerusalem in which heretical ideas, … Continue reading
Judaism & The Trinity
Marc B. Shapiro writes: Throughout Jewish literature one can find any number of explanations as to how the notion of the Trinity is in direct opposition to Jewish teachings, since Judaism demands a simple, unified God. There is no doubt … Continue reading
Studies in Maimonides and His Interpreters
Marc B. Shapiro writes in 2009: In my book I gave many examples of Maimonides misquoting verses from the Pentateuch and the rest of the Bible, which I attributed to Maimonides citing from memory. It is not uncommon for medieval … Continue reading
Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits’s Halakic Vision for the Modern Age
Marc B. Shapiro writes in 2013: How is Jewish law supposed to respond to the incredible changes that have taken place in modern times, most important of which are the expanded role of women in society and the creation of … Continue reading