J Street’s Interesting Friends
One of the first pieces of advice given to investigative journalists is: Follow the money trail. That dossier has now been prepared for J Street, which bills itself as a pro-Israel, pro-peace organization. For...
Only in Israel
We have something in Israel that I think exists no where else in the world. It is Hebrew Book Week. Instituted in 1926 in Tel Aviv, today it has grown to dozens of open-air...
Why Bother Debating?
Two weeks ago, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion for a group of post-university students from the U.S. and Canada who are contemplating aliyah. The topic was “State and Religion in...
Call Me Informant
I snitched on some fellow Jews not long ago. To a government agency yet. It did leave a strange taste, but I think it was the right thing to do. What prompted my unprecedented...
Bored at a Meeting? Make a Kiddush Hashem
How to distract yourself during boring meetings depends on ever-shifting expectations of corporate etiquette. The ubiquity of handheld devices has made it easier – and in many places, more acceptable – to show less...
Supporting Those who Love Us Least
Conservative Americans love Israel — and are even philo-Semitic — to a surprising extent. The examples are legion; what struck me today was discovering that David Yeagley, a Comanche Indian and creator of “the...
Banning Mila and the Ascendance of China
Frum Jews seem to be aware of the proposed bans of bris mila on minor children in San Francisco and Santa Monica, but not terribly alarmed by them. (This is in contradistinction to proposed...
Maryland drivers test 49th out of 51
I have always known this to be true. Now returning you to your regularly-scheduled Jewish content…
French Connection
The latest marchers in the long parade of horribles anxious to murder in the name of a religion of peace are two feckless young men, Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, natives of...
Open Source Gets Closed Down
Richard Stallman can rightly be described as the father of the open-source movement. He created the GNU Project, which aimed to create a free Unix-compatible operating system (finally completed when Linus Torvalds used GNU...