Remembering Rabbi Dov Fischer | The American Spectator

God sent me Dov Fischer.

Many years back, stressed and overwhelmed by the needs of The American Spectator, this desperate publisher got on her knees and prayed. I did, and still do, pray for this publication often. Publishing is a brutal business, and God or God-like benefactors keep the presses humming. In this case, I needed legal writers and so laid out my lament to God (and yes, this is a true story) and two weeks later, one day after the other, God sent me the great former federal prosecutor George Parry, and he sent me noted law professor and rabbi, Dov Fischer. I’ve thought often about this answered prayer. It seems like such a small thing — needing writers — but God saw our need and answered and did what God does, and gave me way more than I asked for.

Dov wrote like no one else. Intelligent, winding, every post was an educational lesson wrapped in a story sprinkled with puns and endearing figures of speech. Wlady Plesczcynski says that The American Spectator is a writer’s magazine, and boy, could Dov write. And write. And write some more. He had so much to say and not in a drunk uncle way. No, what Dov said was so important that the reader didn’t care how many words it took to say it. In fact, it was disappointing when the lesson was over. Dov’s writing had that coveted voice. Readers heard his enthusiasm or sadness or gravity in his writing; they could see in their minds the pictures he created.

In the end, he didn’t say enough. His writing was cut short at the age of 69. He was so youthful, fresh, and alive. And then gone.

It’s taken me months to come to terms with Dov’s passing on Sept. 29, 2025, and I still haven’t quite done it. It is Hanukkah, though, and Dov would have been writing and educating. He would have been saying something like this:

In 2021, Chanukah falls between November 28 at nightfall through December 6 nightfall.

I begin by wishing my non-Jewish readers a Merry Christmas, a meaningful Christmas, a Christmas imbued and steeped with religious meaning and significance, shorn of commercialism and “woke” secularism.

We live in a time when Thanksgiving Thursday competes with Black Friday (systemic racism?), Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, and Clear Out the Inbox from Yesterday’s 250 Emailed Charity Solicitations Wednesday. Despite supply-chain obstructions, massive inflation generated and accelerated by presidential executive orders impeding and even suffocating America’s oil-and-gas industries, and a malaise born of “woke” media agitation to defund police, eliminate bail, teach critical race theory and non-binary gender transsexuality to elementary school children, a botched foreign policy that supports Germany building an oil pipeline with Putin and that imagines reopening for Iran its opportunity to build a nuclear bomb that can target America — all with memories of the Afghanistan evacuation defining the other side of our foreign policies — and with chaos on our southern border as yet another COVID variant emerges for illegal border penetrators to bring disease with them . . .

Amid all this, commercialism dominates a season when holiness should prevail.

I urge you to go read it in full; it’s titled The Chanukah of Fools. It’s a meaty meal of a piece in a media world of McDonald’s. This kind of writing is why The American Spectator exists. It’s long-form commentary at its best. If you read it, you will understand Hanukkah, you’ll learn not just about the holiday, but about yourself and about our culture and about America. This was Dov’s gift: his joy in the telling, his effervescence mixed with reverence for what was important. In the end, the reader was always smarter, more enlightened, and somehow, lighter.

When enduring the vicissitudes of his chronic lung condition and eventual lung transplant, spawning extended writing breaks, readers would inquire, ”Where’s Dov?” Few writers inspired the loyalty Dov engendered. He felt like a friend.

He was my friend. We would write back and forth long philosophy-laden emails harkening back to the days when people wrote letters. He loved road trips, baseball, and country music, something I wrinkled my nose at. “But Melissa! Country music is the quintessential American art form!” We’d bicker about Conway Twitty. I’d say something like, “All country music sounds the same, and it’s depressing!” He’d be shocked and horrified and then regale me with stories of taking his children across the country on back roads, listening to classic country.

On one American trip with my own kids to California, Dov invited us to a Shabbat dinner in his home. In addition to being a professor of law, Dov was also an orthodox rabbi. He hosted a synagogue in his home, and we enjoyed a church service before Shabbat dinner, my son sitting with the men, my daughter and I sitting with the women. We washed our hands, we sang hymns, in both Arabic and Aramaic. And while eating, a small earthquake rumbled through, making an already deeply meaningful dinner more memorable. There, I met Dov’s wife, Ellen. She died less than a year later. And by happenstance, I also met his future wife, Denise, who was a parishioner at the synagogue.

In one evening, this friend of Dov was privileged to see the loves of his life — his orthodoxy, his beautiful wife, his specially invited friends, his home in sunny Southern California, and his role as teacher — all at once. It was deeply moving at the time. It causes a pang of grief when I think of it now.

At one point, enduring the misery of a particularly difficult episode in my personal life, I poured my heart out to Dov, asking his advice, realizing that I wasn’t being professional but needed the wisdom of a learned rabbi. His answer was exhaustive, kind, and, as usual, the exact remedy for what was ailing me.

Privately, we had conversations about Judaism and Christianity, the role of men and women, history, ethics, and on and on. Twice we disagreed. Once gently. Once vehemently. It’s one thing to disagree with some rando on the internet. Who cares, right? It’s another thing to have a fundamentally different take when the person is someone you respect profoundly. Disagreeing with Dov shook me, because it meant that I had better be on solid ground, because I had never seen a time when he wasn’t firmly rooted in the truth.

How do you value a friendship like this? How do you adequately convey what’s missing in the world when someone of such high character, decency, and grace is gone? I have had many losses in my life: a child, recently, my father, my childhood best friend. All of the deaths surprise me — the injury never really goes away. J.R.R. Tolkien captures this in The Lord of the Rings:

“Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,” said Gandalf.

“I fear it may be so with mine,” said Frodo. “There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?”

For the loss of my child, especially, there is no curing, wholly, the wound I’ve endured.

Dov’s loss is different. I can read his writing. I can hear his voice in the reading and on the podcasts I did with him. He is so vivid even now. He is too alive, too prescient, too filled with foresight to feel of the past. Going back to any one piece, and I think, wow, this is important. Timeless. In some cases, filled with eternal truth. In this way, Dov is immortalized. His words stand as a testament to his character and mind and to his vast knowledge and astute insight.

I have to remind myself that he is gone. My friend is at peace now, but I am not. I am left in a country struggling for its soul, in a culture attempting to recover from systemic rot and decay, in a world ruled by elites motivated by antipathy for their fellow man. Men like Dov, with his words and ideas, helped stem this tide, helped illuminate the minds of a new generation of lawyers, helped guide the spiritual lives of his small orthodox flock, and helped educate you and me with beautiful words and lofty ideals. I felt stronger in my fight because we fought together.

My solace and my grief will be rereading his words. Solace, because I will remember him always in the part of himself he left behind. Grief, because there is so much more he could have said, and his voice is needed now, more than ever.

I asked God for a lawyer who could write. God gave me Dov. May his memory be a blessing.

You can watch his memorial service here.

READ MORE from Dov Fischer here.