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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
The Marc Shapiro Voice
Marc B. Shapiro (b. 1962) writes as a collector of anomalies. He finds the passage a later editor removed, the responsum that says what the tradition now denies it said, the photograph cropped to hide a clean-shaven face. Then he … Continue reading
The Chemist, the Professor, and the Giant
Marc Shapiro tells the gelatin story and lets one detail go by too fast. Louis Ginzberg (1873-1953), the great Talmudist at the Jewish Theological Seminary, ruled that gelatin is forbidden. He gave his reason without hedging. He knew R. Hayyim … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro: Gelatin, Supposed Retractions, and Abraham Goldstein
Shapiro’s claim is about evidence and authority. A written responsum beats a remembered conversation, and the gelatin and dishwasher cases let him prove it twice. The dishwasher example is the cleanest piece of reasoning in the post. R. Moshe Feinstein … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro: R. Yudel Rosenberg, R. Mordechai Elefant, and Sexual Abuse
Marc B. Shapiro wrote a typical Seforim Blog grab-bag, and the title shows the strain. He yokes together a correction to his own forgery scholarship, a long meditation on Mordechai Elefant’s memoir, and a short note on rabbinic responses to … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro on Rabbinic Forgery
The strongest section is the first, on the phantom “A. Rosenberg.” Solomon Friedlaender forged a Yerushalmi to Kodashim, then invented a student, Rosenberg, to defend the forgery. The student praised the master. The master praised the student. Both were the … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro on the Chanukah Miracle
What the post does well is map a small scholarly territory. It groups the material by question. Etymology gets one cluster: Mitchell First on the spelling and meaning of Chashmonai and Maccabee, with Dan Rabinowitz on the same. The miracle … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro: ‘If this wasn’t so comical…’
Marc Shapiro (b. 1966) wins most of these exchanges, and he wins them on the simplest ground available: he tells the reader to look at the page. That move runs through the whole piece. Grossman charges him with citing Rivash … Continue reading
The Question MO Will Not Ask
Do you accept historicism (that everything is a product of a time and place)? If not, on what grounds? The question is simple to state. It is difficult to answer. It is the question Modern Orthodox scholarship will not ask, … Continue reading
Marc Shapiro: ‘Comments on recent books by R. Benji Levy and R. Eitam Henkin; R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik; and the first color photographs of R. Jehiel Jacob Weinberg’
Marc B. Shapiro’s Levy and Henkin reviews each carry a sharp critical point. The Soloveitchik archive material is good for what it shows about how the Rav functioned in practice and how scholarship on him gets shaped by selective access … Continue reading
‘Between East and West: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob Weinberg’
Marc B. Shapiro (b. 1966) opens his 1995 Harvard thesis with a dramatic story. Larry McEnerney would mark it up approvingly. He would also find places where Shapiro reverts to graduate-school habits. Look at the first sentence of the preface. … Continue reading