Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
For many Americans, the issue of greatest salience has nothing to do with the Middle East, the groyper menace, or Jeffrey Epstein. Rather, it has to do with the reasonable concern that they soon won’t be able to afford the life they’re currently living. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment is at its … Read more
Men used to fight wars and build things. Now they sob on podcasts and have meltdowns online. Anyone arguing that men are somehow the more rational of the sexes has a lot of explaining to do: The energy once reserved for fighting wars or building nations or surging ahead with glorious careers is now spent … Read more
At the risk of you all thinking I’m trolling you, I’ve got to say something out loud: I’m not that upset about Zohran Mamdani’s win last night. A big part of that is because I’m not surprised. And yes, should Mamdani become mayor, we’ll get more of the same lunatic policies that started bringing New … Read more
In a world of globalized alienation, secular and religious Israelis alike remain proudly connected to their story as a people, through rituals as old as the Passover Seder and as new as the letters soldiers write before they go into battle The numbers are in: Israel is a happy place. Despite constantly facing vicious enemies … Read more
My father arrived in America from Germany in 1939, 75 years ago. It was March 17, St. Patrick’s Day—a holiday my father had never heard of—and New York City’s marching bands and colorful parade amazed him. If this was how America welcomed immigrants, it was truly fantastic. St. Patrick’s Day would become my family’s special … Read more
The chickpea connects modern-day Jews to our ancestors from thousands of years ago. Chickpeas were one of the first legumes to be cultivated by humans. Evidence of wild chickpeas dating back to 8000 BCE was discovered in Tell el-Kerkh, in present-day Syria. Called chometz in Hebrew, chickpeas are only mentioned once in the Bible, in … Read more
The 100-year reign of impeccably credentialed but utterly mediocre meme processors is coming to an end Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, … Read more
My name is Simon Aban Deng. I am from South Sudan. I am a Shilluk. I am a Christian. I am a former slave. I will not forget that day when Arab Sudanese government troops came and raided my village. We didn’t know what was going on until we heard gunshots from every direction. I … Read more
Not all Jews dreamed of becoming doctors or lawyers. More than a century ago, schools taught a generation of immigrants ‘manual education’—to increase their own job prospects, and to aid assimilation into American culture. The American Hebrew, New York’s leading English-language Jewish newspaper of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was not given to … Read more
“Free Palestine”—the slogan, the fantasy, and the policy—has always consciously implied the mass murder of Jews in their towns, streets, shops, and living rooms. Few are willing to say so openly, but in many intellectual, professional, and popular circles in the Middle East and the West, the idea of Palestinian national liberation has long been … Read more
Hamas’ terrorist attack this weekend took everyone by surprise, but it did not occur in a vacuum. How did we get here? Here’s a brief annotated reader. First, let’s look at the last major Gaza war, in 2021, which started, not coincidentally, shortly after Joe Biden took office: As with the conflagration before that, in … Read more
Sure, they add a special something to your bagels and lox. But you can also find them growing at the Western Wall, or read about them in the Mishna. The caper bush (Capparis spinosa) has grown wild around the Mediterranean for millennia. It is one of the few plants that flourishes between the Judean desert … Read more
Angela Davis was a dedicated fangirl of Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev and cult leader Jim Jones. So why is she presented to children as a hero? Every day, my son, who is in seventh grade, sees a quotation from Angela Davis painted on his school’s wall: “Radical simply means grasping things at the root.” (The … Read more
While the Biden administration has been busy encouraging and funding the Israeli protest movement against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms, it has also launched a far more potentially dangerous and lethal attempt to destabilize the leading military power in the Middle East. The wave of domestic protests in Israel comes on the heels … Read more
The internet has brought jihadists, neo-Nazis, and anarchists together through their shared hatred of Jews Nicholas Young, a District of Columbia Metro Transit Police officer, was a fixture in the local D.C. neo-Nazi scene in the early 2000s. Sporting an SS tattoo on his arm, he collected German World War II memorabilia and attended parties … Read more
Big Pharma and Big Tobacco are helping market high-potency, psychosis-inducing THC products as your mother’s ‘medical marijuana’ For 30 years, Dr. Libby Stuyt, a recently retired addiction psychiatrist in Pueblo, Colorado, treated patients with severe drug dependency. Typically, that meant alcohol, heroin, and methamphetamines. But about five years ago, she began to see something new. … Read more
Is being Jewish a race? A national origin? An ethnicity? A religion? All four? The answer is: It’s complicated. To begin with, in late 1800s America, “race” was often used to include groups such as Jews, Arabs, Swedes, Italians, and the like. That’s important, because the Civil Rights Act of 1866 provided that “All persons” … Read more
This weekend, millions of people will sit around Seder tables and memorialize the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Guided by the Haggadah, or Passover text—one of the most popular Jewish books ever written—Seder participants are led along in a series of prayers, texts, and activities. We talk and talk and talk about the miracle … Read more
This past week the legislative committee of the Episcopal Church met via Zoom as part of their 80th General Convention. There were 196 resolutions in total; eight were oriented, in one way or another, toward criticism of Israeli policy with regard to the Palestinians. Three were about “apartheid,” variously titled “confronting apartheid,” “recognizing apartheid,” or … Read more
It was a week to Christmas, but Lincoln Eccles wasn’t feeling the Yuletide spirit. The boiler in the 14-unit building he owns in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood had gone belly up a few months before, and supply chain issues were making it impossible to find a good replacement. It was getting cold in New York, … Read more
If you ask Chinese diplomats stationed in Israel, they will tell you that “there is no antisemitism in China.” Their Israeli counterparts in Beijing will likely tell you the same: that an observant Jew can stroll down any main street in Shanghai with a yarmulke on his head without fear of verbal or physical harassment—which … Read more
How an ancient food made in sheepskin bags by camel-riding nomads became a modern breakfast favorite Yogurt is one of the oldest foods known to humans. It has been a staple in the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and India for millennia. Legend even has it that Moses ate yogurt on his way to the … Read more
The iconoclastic gestures of the woke left bear an alarming resemblance to the excesses of the French Revolution I spent the first third of my career among conservatives and the next two-thirds among progressives. At first, I thought both parties were equally cynical and instrumental when it came to theories of constitutional authority. The party … Read more
The Yente of Fiddler on the Roof is pushy, intrusive, and an incorrigible gossip. But for the Jewish singles in the little Russian town of Anatevka in the early 1900s, she was their only option to find a suitable match for marriage. Fast forward more than a century, and Sholem Aleichem’s depiction of the Jewish … Read more
The aftermath of a calamitous 2020, as the virus and lockdown trapped people inside with their own fears, is the growth of conspiracy theories in American society that blame Jews for the country’s troubles. This dangerous development has taken root not only among ideological extremists but in groups with a dangerous purchase on the mainstream. … Read more