This past December, a Modern Orthodox Jewish high school in Riverdale, N.Y., started allowing two female students to put on tefillin, small black leather boxes containing verses from the Bible with ...

Fred Lerner of White River Junction, Vt., a little town that has now accounted for two straight columns (see last week’s “Now Shmear This”), has a complaint. He writes: “In the January 20 issue of the ...

There is a sentence in the Torah that has proven almost irresistibly generative—one of those lines that refuses to stay put on the page. “Bind these words as a sign upon your hand,” it commands, “and ...