This spring, I was writing an article and I wanted to look up some background from something I had written when I was editing the Rockland Jewish Reporter. I went to the Jewish Federation of Rockland County’s website, where I had always been able to reliably search for these things, only to find that at […]
Early this summer, I was worrying about Shapira, a neighborhood in Tel Aviv. Shapira is near the central bus station, about a mile from the boardwalk, and teeming with recent immigrants from Africa. It also happens to be the neighborhood where my 17-year-old daughter, Lily, is living for the year. Through July and much of […]
Sometimes when you publish or post something, the news overtakes it. And something that seemed so relevant one minute is hopelessly out of synch with reality in the next. That’s what happened yesterday, when sadly, my post about the three kidnapped teens in Israel was overrun by the kind of news I never wanted to […]
A yeasty smell emanates from the lower level of my house. It’s heavy and warm, both sweet and sour. It reminds me of my son when he was a baby — the smell of his neck on a hot summer’s day, a little…fermented. Fermentation is what’s going on in the dark of my basement. My […]
Golf, the venerable sport of country clubs, the Masters green jacket, sand pits, birdies, bogeys, Tiger Woods and tradition, is in trouble. Yes, golf. According to a recent New York Times article, the game has lost 5 million players in the past decade, a number roughly four times the size of the 2012 census for my […]
The first time I put on tefillin, I was probably in a post bat mitzvah class. One of the madrichim from my Israel trip brought his set to class. I don’t recall what the lesson was about, beyond showing us the workings of the tefillin and how to wrap them, but this being a Reform […]
When I was working my first post-college job in the library of the Dallas Morning News, I had more papers at my disposal than anyone in the pre-internet era would have known what to do with. As I did my work, filing and cross-filing clips and attending to back-end content of one of the first […]
I had already had enough of Thanksgivukkah and its menurkeys (that’s a menorah shaped like a turkey for you blissfully uninitiated) when I saw the bourbon pecan pie adorned with Chanukah gelt. This was supposed to be yet another recipe merging the Chanukah and Thanksgiving traditions, but really it was just a pecan pie with […]
This Friday we remember the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I am not old enough to remember the how Nov. 22, 1963 unfolded, but I was there. It was one of those events, that although I was too little to comprehend it, shaped the place I was from and my […]
Oh no! The sky is falling! The Jewish people are doomed! No, wait, that’s just the sound that the latest American Jewish population survey makes when it slams into the Jewish communal world. I wrote this column in the week following the publication of “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” the Pew Research Center’s survey […]
