Talk:Abraham J. Twerski

Suggestions for Improvement?
Here is a question for experienced Wikipedians, especially experienced in Judaism, psychology, self-help, and generally in biographies of living persons.

If you visit a Jewish bookstore you will see that Twerski is a major author nowadays. There can be a rack filled with only his books. And this page gets about 500 hits per month. I felt that this page deserved to have more than it did.

My question here is: what, if anything, does the Twerski page deserve next?

I have been trying to improve this page over the last month, maybe get it out of Start class.


 * Reorganized formerly incoherent front section describing his life and work (into medical career, religious career, life)
 * Added text describing his medical career
 * Added section describing his adaptation of 12-step ideas to traditional Jewish ethics, because I think this is one of his noteworthy contributions (and I found a pretty good paper talking about it)
 * Improved the listing of books in the Works section. (This was the most time consuming part.)
 * Started using citations, cleaned up external links section

Here are what I think the current deficiencies are:

Informed opinions solicited.
 * Somebody had already flagged the unsourced material from his religious biography. I don't want to delete the material, but I can't find sources either.
 * I feel this article does not adequately address the two non-Jewish chunks of Twerski's oveure: self-help books (on any number of topics) and a certain number of psychiatry books (mostly on his specialty, addiction issues). These need to be at least mentioned.
 * I'm not sure what Twerski's contributions outside of Judaism are. Are there notable theoretical contributions to the study of addiction that can be attributed to him?  Is he a really good clinician who writes a lot, but there is little else to say?
 * Whoever wrote the first paragraph, situating Twerski as a member of a certain Hasidic line of rabbis and naming his parents, knew what is important to the audience for this page. I feel the description of his life talks too much about his brothers, family, and so on. But maybe for readers in the Hasidic community this type of material is considered important biographical information?  I am inclined to leave it stand.

Also, is there any way to find out if have I finally improved this page out of Start class quality, from the Judaism and Biography projects?

(I have *no* idea who will read this. Certainly nobody will stumble on it by accident.)

-- M.boli (talk) 20:13, 13 November 2009 (UTC)


 * Don't ask me; I'm here because he's a Milwaukee northside boy, and I'm a local; but I'm about as goyische a bubba as you're gonna find outside a KKK rally! -- Orange Mike  &#x007C;   Talk  14:57, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

External links modified
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I have just modified 2 external links on Abraham J. Twerski. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20091003020623/http://torahlectures.com/s-Rabbi-Dr-Avraham-Twerski.aspx to http://torahlectures.com/s-Rabbi-Dr-Avraham-Twerski.aspx
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090228194711/http://bethjehudah.org/meet.htm to http://www.bethjehudah.org/meet.htm

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The Miracle of the Grape Juice and Possible Biographical Stories
A user added a paragraph describing a Miracle of the Grape Juice. The essence of the story is that Twerski, acting as a counselor to a recovering alcoholic priest, persauded the pope to let the priest use grape juice instead of wine. This unsourced and exaggerated-sounding story was deleted. I have found a much attenuated version, seemingly from Twerski himself. I'm not sure about the grape juice story, but I think it is possible that material from this article, a kind of celebrity profile in the Jewish Standard, might provide some good biographical stories for this wikipedia page. M.boli (talk) 00:10, 16 January 2019 (UTC)