More than 60 years, baseball big leaguer Ralph Branca kept famously quiet about the 1951 baseball game between the Giants and Dodgers that ended with the Giants winning the pennant.

Branca, of the Brooklyn Dodgers, served the final pitch resulting in Bobby Thomson’s three-run home run, which was dubbed “the shot heard ‘round the world.”

The historic game marked a crushing defeat for Branca, who, because of that one ill-fated pitch, became known by many as a “goat,” while Thomson was crowned a hero.

On January 1, 2012, Joe Frost turned 107.

Honored last year by the city of Clifton as its oldest resident, Frost has lived in that city since the age of 12.

“He was born in Passaic in 1905,” said Bill Frisch, Frost’s 80-year-old nephew, also a Clifton resident. “We have his birth certificate.”

His uncle, however, moved to the neighboring town as a child and is still there, albeit now at Daughters of Miriam.

Lee Miller and Steve Ulin have learned a great deal from their father, now 101. Born in Sieradz, Poland, in 1910, Nathan Ulin taught his children the virtues of independence, ethical behavior, and pride in the Jewish people.

“From the time I was little, he always said make your family and the Jewish community proud,” recalls his son Steve, a Hillsdale resident. “He said, ‘My word is my bond and I stand by it. You have to do the same.’ He’s a very ethical and moral person. It’s primary in his life to be thought of in that way.”

“Until just a few years ago, he’s always been a fiercely independent man,” added Ulin’s daughter Lee Miller, a resident of East Brunswick. Her father — whose travels took him from Poland to Massachusetts to New Jersey — now lives at Daughters of Miriam in Clifton.

A new book unveils the joy of sex for a group that has traditionally kept the subject under wraps — Orthodox Jews. “There wasn’t any source of accurate sexual information for the religious community,” said Dr. David Ribner, co-author with Dr. Jennie Rosenfeld of the book “Et Le’ehov [a time to love]: The Newlywed’s Guide to Physical Intimacy.”

Ribner, who is director of the sex therapy training program at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, reported that the current consensus at sex therapy conventions is that “there’s a right for everyone to have sexual enjoyment.”

Last spring, I walked into a sixth-grade classroom where the girls welcomed me with squeals of delight, excited to show me the dance routine they had created to the rap song “Take It Off.” The lyrics include:

LOS ANGELES – Ask Dr. David Ribner what he thinks about Jewish couples using sex toys and you get an answer you may not have expected.

The chairman of the sex therapy training program at the School of Social Work at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and himself a certified sex therapist, Ribner answers questions about the acceptability of the devices at http://www.koshersextoys.net, a website that sells the devices and is geared to Orthodox Jews.

“While Jewish law and tradition have long recognized the centrality of sexual satisfaction to a successful marriage,” he said in a response to a question for this article, “only recently have we been witness to more public efforts to promote this goal. Kosher Sex Toys [which runs the website and sells the items] is a step in this direction.”

WASHINGTON – Birth control is rapidly gaining steam as an election-year wedge issue, with Jewish advocates lobbying out front and behind the scenes in what is shaping up as a clash between calls for individual freedom and religious liberty.

Several Jewish groups and lawmakers played a behind-the-scenes role in the latest flashpoint: last month’s order by the Obama administration requiring most religious institutions — other than houses of worship — to include contraceptives in health care coverage for their employees. The order has been strongly criticized by the Republican presidential front-runners, who portray it as proof that the Obama administration is hostile to religious communities.

As concerns mount over the environmental and public health consequences of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, Jewish groups are coalescing around a strategy that supports efforts to extract natural gas from shale rock while seeking to mitigate its worst effects.

In May, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the community’s main public policy umbrella group, will consider a draft resolution on fracking that in its current form acknowledges the potential benefits of a major new source of natural gas while urging greater oversight and government regulation of the practice.