When I was growing up, Temple Emanu El in Dallas would hold an annual art show and sale we would attend. There was work by local, national and Israeli artists and I it always seemed very sophisticated and special to get to attend. Sometimes, my parents would even buy prints, and we acquired a series […]
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 […]
I stood at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza with a group of colleagues fromwork, barely able to move, sweat trickling down my back. I have been here before, I thought. But this time, it feels different. I scrolled through Facebook seeing people I know post that they were in the crowd, “Am Yisrael Chai!” I kept […]
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 […]
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 […]
In early September, I stood outside JCC Rockland and with a group of about 50 people spanning generations, remembered the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered in the 1972 Munich Olympics. You could say it was an off year memorial, the 41st since Palestinian terrorists took the athletes hostage. It was small and simple, and […]
The world is a really queer place. How else can you explain the idea that is gaining traction that Israel is using its favorable record on gay rights to mask abuses of occupation? But that is the argument of those who are touting pinkwashing. Promoted primarily by Sarah Schulman, a professor at the College of Staten […]
The first time I davened at the Kotel, I was 16 and with a group of girls from my teen tour. Our leaders brought us to the last vestige of the Temple, the remaining western wall. The boys and men funneled down the path to the men’s side to do their thing and we were […]
Monsey man trades yeshiva studies for IDF service Sgt. Chaim Silber was waiting for the order — the one that would take him and his unit, the 202nd Airborne, also known as the Vipers, into Gaza. While Silber waited, so did the world — to see if a fragile, brokered ceasefire between Hamas and Israel […]
Sometimes when you cover a story for a newspaper, it’s the story behind the story that can really make your day. I was covering a small dessert gathering at which Nadia, who had recently completed her stint in the Israeli army, and Tatiana, with eight months to go, were telling their story of making aliyah […]
