Year: 2022

THE CAMPAIGN TO DISCREDIT RABBI MOSHE FEINSTEIN

Jul 31, 2019

After being offered an obscure book called Maaneh Le’igros by a bookdealer, Rabbi Dunner stumbles across the long-forgotten story of a concerted campaign to undermine the halachic authority and status of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein during the 1960s. Rabbi Dunner charts the ups-and-downs of this fascinating kulturkampf, later abortively reignited by the author of Maaneh Le’igros in 1973. In this fascinating lecture, discover how the lines were drawn for orthodox Jewry as the first generation of Holocaust survivors struggled to recreate the lost world of pre-war European orthodoxy.

08/06/2019 RABBI DUNNER ADDS: A number of viewers have pointed out that Rav Moshe, in three published teshuvos, prohibited shaking hands with women and questioned those rabbis who permitted it. These queries are justified — my apologies for implying that Rav Moshe allowed this “lechatchila”. However, many talmidim of Rav Moshe have confirmed (some to me personally) that although he was reluctant to go on record on this issue, he would allow business handshaking in certain situations. This is confirmed in Mesoret Moshe (1:EH #56) published by Rav Moshe’s grandson, where Rav Moshe is quoted as permitting shaking hands with a woman to perform the kinyan of mechirat chametz. Aditionally, Rav Getzel Ellinson, in his comprehensive work on “Women and Mitzvot” (Vol. 2, Ch. 2, FN #86) writes that he clarified the issue with Rav Moshe personally. Rav Moshe made a distinction between extending a hand (which he said was unequivocally prohibited) and returning a handshake which he found difficult to openly permit, but which he acknowledged was both done and permitted by pious individuals. Actually, if you look at Rav Moshe’s teshuvos, he says that one is prohibited “lehoshit yad” — to extend one’s hand — implying that if a hand is extended to a man by a woman he may take it. From another talmid of Rav Moshe I heard that any such handshake shouldn’t be a grip, but the hand should remain limp, so that it is in the category of “karka olam”, based on the gemara in Megilla about Esther and Achashveirosh. Once again, I apologize for implying in the video that this was lechatchila, and I hope the above clarifies the details.

From YouTube, here.

It’s worse to be raised by a single mother, even if you’re not poor.

BY W. BRADFORD WILCOX

JULY 20, 20128:22 AM

At first glance, I might qualify as the poster boy for Katie Roiphe’s recent Slate article defending single mothers and their children. Raised by a strong and resourceful single mother, I turned out OK. Sure, I had some unusually angry outbursts as a child (like the time I threw my lunchbox across the dining hall at camp for no good reason) and had to endure my share of therapy for that anger. But I have managed to steer clear of prison, earn a Ph.D., hold down a decent job, and marry up. My life is proof positive, as Roiphe argues, that married-parent families “do not have a monopoly on joy or healthy environments or thriving children.”

But, as a social scientist, I can also say that the academic research paints a much more complicated picture of the impact of family structure on children than does my life story or Roiphe’s experience. It is true, as Roiphe believes, that most children from single-parent homes turn out fine. In her book, For Better or For Worse, psychologist E. Mavis Hetherington estimated that about 75 percent of children of divorce suffered from no major pathologies. In other words, most children of divorce do not end up depressed, drugged out, or delinquent.

But Hetherington, who like Roiphe embraces changing family structures, also was honest enough to admit that divorce tends to double a child’s risk of a serious negative outcome. Specifically, she found that “twenty-five percent of youths from divorced families in comparison to 10 percent from non-divorced families did have serious social, emotional, or psychological problems.” Other research suggests that the children of never-married single parents tend to do somewhat worse than children of divorced single parents.

Take two contemporary social problems: teenage pregnancy and the incarceration of young males. Research by Sara McLanahan at Princeton University suggests that boys are significantly more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by a single mother. Specifically, McLanahan and a colleague found that boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity. Research on young men suggests they are less likely to engage in delinquent or illegal behavior when they have the affection, attention, and monitoring of their own mother and father.

But daughters depend on dads as well. One study by Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona found that about one-third of girls whose fathers left the home before they turned 6 ended up pregnant as teenagers, compared with just 5 percent of girls whose fathers were there throughout their childhood. This dramatic divide was narrowed a bit when Ellis controlled for parents’ socioeconomic background—but only by a few percentage points. The research on this topic suggests that girls raised by single mothers are less likely to be supervised, more likely to engage in early sex, and to end up pregnant compared with girls raised by their own married parents.

Continue reading…

From Slate, here.