Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Dear Steve and Bill,

Many of us have watched in amazement and dismay the increasingly bitter primary battle ensuing between you. You were once close friends and allies. Now that you are contesting the same Congressional seat, the natural affection that once bound you has become undone.

For a moment, let me remove my hat as a Republican candidate for public office and speak only wearing my yarmulke, as a Rabbi who has known Cory for twenty years and has had the blessing throughout that time of an intimate, brotherly friendship.

Many of us...

Time magazine's cover story about attachment parenting has garnered a great deal of attention. Clearly, the shock value of showing an attractive young mother breast-feeding a child nearly four was enough to excite worldwide conversation. No doubt this was their intention, and in that sense, it worked. The story within...

Could a governmental retreat from "marriage" finally heal the deep schism that has divided and immobilized this country by an intractable values volley over gay relationships?

As many of you have read, since running for Congress I have emphasized that I want to move away from the great social-sexual battles...

All a man has in this world is his good name. The book of Ecclesiastes says that a good name is better than fine oil. Our reputations determine what others think of our character. We have a right, therefore, to defend our name against scurrilous and slanderous attack. When those...

What a difference one year makes. Last year I praised President Obama for not wanting to "spike the football" by releasing gruesome death photos of Osama bin Laden. But this year, forget spiking the football. The president is doing an end-zone dance.

The Bible says that when someone incurs the...

I am saddened that Richard Grennell, Mitt Romney's foreign policy spokesman, resigned over what the press is saying was pressure from the far right because he is openly gay. Who cares? He had a distinguished career as a spokesman for four United Nations Ambassadors and was widely respected. It is...

I had already twice hosted Benjamin Netanyahu -- at the time Israel's deputy foreign minister -- at the University of Oxford before I extended my first invitation to his scholarly father to lecture in turn. The elderly Netanyahu had recently published his internationally-celebrated opus Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth...

Arriving in L.A. to serve as scholar-in-residence this past weekend, I picked up the handsome brochure put out by Chabad.org on the weekly Torah reading. Contained therein was a short piece by Rabbi Aron Moss addressing the question of why some children are born with mental disability. Moss' answer, however...

There are two people running against me in the Republican primary for New Jersey's Ninth district and recently I had an interesting lesson in politics from both. Call me naïve, but I really thought we could have a primary where people respected each other and treated one another as friends....

Last week I held a press conference at The Korean-American Voters' Council in New Jersey. I shared with them my strong feelings of affinity with the Korean community whose values and circumstances reflect those of the Jewish community in many ways. South Korea lives under the threat of destruction from...

When I lived in England, I got used to my British friends regularly taking digs at how primitive America is compared to enlightened Europe. To be sure, most of the time the mocking denigration was done in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, and they really weren't looking to offend me...

It's good that Hilary Rosen apologized for her comments that Ann Romney, who chose to be a stay-at-home mom to raise her five boys, had 'never worked a day in her life.' It took a day for Rosen to finally acknowledge that her comments were unhelpful, but she finally said,...

My dear friend Kathryn Milofsky arranged for me to speak with Trayvon Martin's mother, Sybrina Fulton, and her attorney Benjamin Crump, today just before Passover. We had invited Trayvon's parents to our Passover seder, but as that could not be worked out I was grateful to speak to Ms. Fulton...

The dream of every politician is to run for office without becoming a politician. The word has too many negative connotations: unbridled ambition, a willingness to say anything to get elected, a permanent bloodlust for campaign cash, a selfish yearning for public glory and a preparedness to trample on all...

Having experienced ferocious criticism for publishing "Kosher Jesus" from people who confessed to having never read my book, I don't want to make the same mistake with Peter Beinart's new tome on Zionism. Despite having received two separate copies from his publisher, I have not yet found the time to...

No greater tragedy can befall parents than having to bury a child. This is especially true when the child is killed and a perpetrator gets away with it. In this sense no American can but feel the double pain of the parents of Trayvon Martin.

On the other side of...

President Obama's recent open mic comments to President Medvedev of Russia are troubling, which explains why Obama and the White House have decided to make light of them. It seems that every time a microphone captures the president in unscripted remarks, he's saying something that goes against his...

There's a reason why the Mormons fielded two top candidates in a single presidential election cycle and there's a reason why the comparatively small church is surging to prominence worldwide. Primarily, it's the fact that they inculcate within their teenagers the idea of mandatory service. From age nineteen to twenty-one,...

Until you have sought Federal office there is no way you could even dream of the rigors of running. I am in its earliest stages and can barely believe the daily fundraising, phone calls to party delegates and leaders, grass-roots campaigning and meeting people (which is the part I love),...