Are you into Jews and politics?
Then you have to read Connie Bruck’s in-depth story on Sheldon Adelson III, the casino magnate and philanthropist for a window into how a very wealthy man wields his influence in America and Israel with a very ample wallet and a strong personality.
It’s personal, I’ll admit, because my grandfather was killed by a handgun way back in 1939, but I think today’s Supreme Court decision striking down the DC ban on handguns is the wrong way to read the US Constitution and a disaster for Gun Control laws.
The only glimmer of hope for me is that there […]
What an inspiring story that is very real for Jewish teens at summer camp.
Ben Harris is blogging on the JTA website about the decision of BBYO Camp Beber in Wisconsin to educate its campers about the necessity for making the right ethical choices with regard to labor practices and kashrut issues at Agriprocessors, the heavily […]
One of my kids has taken to calling me Norman, my middle name, for my mother’s late father, a kindly gentleman of Wisconsin, murdered in 1939 and thereby truncating my own mother’s youth and grandmother’s aspirations for the Wonderful Life.
“Norman, how was Shul?” she’ll ask.
Or, “Norman, how’d the Mets do?”
She refers to Milwaukee’s baseball team […]
George Carlin, one of the great comedians of the last fifty years, died yesterday of heart failure.
His New York Times obit is here.
His obit from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which mentions his arrest there in the early 70s for his famous bit, “Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television” (which moved him into my personal pantheon […]
from the On Faith page of the Washington Post
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There’s something so cynical about all these people who leave Saturday Night Live to pursue their careers (i.e. the higher pay of Hollywood) and in the process forgo any remnants of originality they had in the live action of improvisational comedy.
With regards to Mike Myers in the […]
One of the great reads of this spring and summer is Jonathan Rosen’s Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature.
For those who love birds, think they love birds, saw a bird once–I’d recommend it.
Jonathan was founding arts and literary editor of the Forward back in the day, is editorial […]
I went running from meeting to meeting, from conversation to conversation, from phone call to phone call today–never really with a moment’s rest. And it’s been that way for weeks and weeks. Or months and months. And I’m still behind. The nature of the work, we say, which makes the mindful […]
You know things are interesting when a Reform rabbi agrees mightily with United Torah Judaism in Israel.
In response to the questionable ruling by the rabbi of Ofra, an Israeli settlement accused of expanding its hold on a neighboring Palestinian village by allowing for work to continue on Shabbat so that homes can be occupied before […]
I woke up this morning to the heat and a brief decision to not read the news right away but instead to look at an old book of my mom’s which I brought back East after the last visit–the pen and ink drawings of a Milwaukee artist named Steve Slaske.
I was soothed by a landscape […]