Greetings!
“How do you say ‘the horse died’ in Yiddish?” asked the African-American panhandler to whom I had given a quarter when he accosted me in lower Manhattan. It was many years ago, shortly after...
Author: Avi Shafran
Commanded
Just in time for Rosh Hashanah, a number of media, including the Wall St. Journal and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, found a good “Jewish” story in the popularity and abundance of dogs in Tel...
A Mid-East Inconvenient Truth
Yes, yes, I get it. “Ethnic cleansing” conjures images of Nazi expulsions and murders of Jews, or the 1990s Bosnian war, when Serb and Croat forces intimidated, forcibly expelled or massacred one another to...
Tempest in a Tallis
The image was, to be sure, jarring: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump being draped in a tallis. By an African-American pastor. In a Detroit church. To resounding applause. Bishop Wayne Jackson of the Great...
Conservatism in Crisis
If the phrase “alt-right” puts you in mind of a computer keyboard, you are (blessedly) not following the presidential campaign. Even if you are aware of the phrase, though, you may not have a...
Unrighteous Indignation
And here, all this time, we thought Auschwitz was a Polish death camp. It was, of course, at least in the sense that it was a place in Poland where upward of a million...
Illusions of Objectivity
Some American journalists assigned to the political beat are having a hard time. Their dilemma is named Donald Trump, a man they don’t feel they can cover objectively. Those troubled are reporters with a...
Summer Camps and Summer Camps
There are all sorts of summer camps. Most familiar to most of us are summer youth experiences like Camp Agudah’s various branch-camps and the broad assortment of others like them. They combine Torah-study and...
Silence Can Be Golden
What’s omitted from a discussion can sometimes speak quite loudly. And sometimes quite disturbingly. That’s true, I think, about the national conversation about the Khizr and Ghazala Khan/Donald Trump contretemps. Unless you’ve been summering...
The Enemy
In December, 2014, after a driver shouting Islamic slogans mowed down more than a dozen pedestrians in Dijon, France, the city’s chief prosecutor called the attacks the work of an unbalanced man whose motivations...
Recent Comments