The Business Page of the Times carries an interesting story about 25 year old Jared Kushner who has bought a controlling interest in the New York Observer.
In a sidebar column, media columnist David Carr comments directly on Jared’s age, quoting Observer editor Peter Kaplan, making a great point that all of us should pay attention […]
Do you stop now?
Dozens of children among the dead being pulled from the rubble in Lebanon.
Is this what Israel wanted?
Is this what Hezbollah wanted Israel to want?
How do you play this chess game? A proxy war, maybe even a preview war, with Iran and Syria, that in a decade or two is a […]
Well it was only going to be a matter of time.
Seattle, it turns out, is the first place to see a violent domestic sectarian reaction to the current fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Extra vigilance is generally taken at Jewish institutions during times of war, but damage will most always be done when a […]
Sometimes I don’t put the tefillin away immediately after davenning but leave them in a disorderly bundle atop the piano. There, with the tallis, they take on the form of sculpture, animated by their unfolded state and conveying a sense of movement and habitation. They not only say, “A man prayed here recently,” […]
These are days of exhaustion, when people of our generation retreat over and over throughout the day to their laptops, looking for signs that their own relatively comfortable position can be comforted by better news than the expect to find.
At the coffee shop the other day, I saw a young woman who I thought was […]
This will cheer you up:
“In short, we find them [the Jews] only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched. Still, we ought not to burn them.”
For Voltaire, writing […]
Another trip to the cemetery, this one on Sunday for an unveiling for a Holocaust survivor who died last year. This time, instead of the drive out to Farmingdale, Long Island, the trip required a short journey to the suburb of Paramus, New Jersey, off Route 4, just over the George Washington Bridge.
These small […]
Yesterday on a hot day at the cemetery, we were about to get back in the cars to return to Brooklyn, when some of the mourning family said to the driver, “We want to go visit Grandma’s grave.”
The driver smiled politely, nodded, and about 12 people walked over to another grave to stand over it […]
The complaint was that he couldn’t really get into his Torah portion.
“I’m having trouble relating to it,” said the knit brow, the shy smile.
He didn’t want to insult his new rabbi.
“Have you read it?” I asked.
Now he was really embarassed.
Oops.
So we looked closely at it inside while outside, on an unbearably muggy Brooklyn […]
It’s clear from the past couple months that what we’re seeing in Israel today with the Hezbollah attack from Lebanon is a well coordinated effort on behalf of Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria to draw Israel into a multi-front war.
Still a committed two-stater, one for Israelis and one for Palestinians, I left my illusions behind in […]