Avi Shafran

3 days ago | amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran

It isn’t often that The New York Times runs an editorial—the official voice of the paper—that runs more than 2,000 words. But that’s what happened last week and its topic was anti-Semitism. It was a remarkable read. Titled, “Anti-Semitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses,” it offered a detailed and unapologetic expansion of what its title proclaimed, giving examples and decrying excuse makers.

1 week ago | amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran

The hostages are freed. No, not those hostages, unfortunately. Rather, the intrepid seafarers of the “Freedom Flotilla,” the smile-for-the-cameras attempt to deliver some token aid to Gaza. The last of the captured gangplank gang have now been unceremoniously deported.

2 weeks ago | amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran

Many a Jewish educational institution or organization will readily tell you that fundraising is an uphill slog. But it’s smooth sailing if you’re an anti-Jewish terrorist entity like Hamas, which, without official fundraisers, receives largesse from a number of eager sources. There’s Iran, of course. Any cause holding the promise of dead Jews is a shoo-in for the mullahs.

2 weeks ago | aish.com | Avi Shafran

In a sobering turn of events, the New York State Senate has voted to legalize physician-assisted suicide through the passage of the Medical Aid in Dying Act (S.138), following a similar vote in the Assembly earlier this spring. The legislation now awaits the governor’s signature. If enacted, it will permit doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs to individuals deemed by two physicians to have fewer than six months to live. The implications of such a law are deeply unsettling.

3 weeks ago | amimagazine.org | Avi Shafran

Had you been spying on my backyard on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago, you would have seen an unusual sight: me, wearing a hardhat, safety goggles and work gloves, wielding a chainsaw, preparing to chop down a tree that had become a nuisance. Felling a tree is an art of sorts. One first makes a wedge-cut on the side facing where the tree is to land, and then cuts through the trunk from the other side.