Category: Other

I first met Menachem Mirski when I and my wife Judy went to Poland in the fall of 2010 to help in a Jewish revival. Mirski was not a Rabbi then. He had only recently converted to Judaism then. Now he is a wonderful Rabbi. I offer my readers…

I began this blog in the weeks after October 7 to think in public about Jewish life, our safety, memory, identity, and politics. I posted unevenly, sometimes wide, sometimes narrowly, but the center of gravity has been consistent.

The world…

Last week, while rummaging through some old papers, I came across a document I had typed more than forty years ago. It was on onion-skin paper, complete with a few typos corrected by hand above the lines. Instantly, I was transported back to…

JD Vance was the GOP’s signal flare — the up-from-nowhere firebrand poised to be the next president, the man who channeled MAGA’s angry base and packaged anti-interventionism like the GOP’s freshest creed. He screamed culture war,…

100 years ago, the Rosenberg Brothers were brewing “Max Brau” Palestinian beer in Acre.  This advertisement appeared in a 1926 edition of Palestine & Near East Economic Magazine- “A Fortnightly for Trade, Industry & Agriculture.”

The high-stakes maneuvers unfolding in the Mediterranean have signaled a definitive attempt by Libya’s legitimate legislative authorities to break the military and financial stranglehold imposed by foreign occupiers. While the international…

Abu Sabah, Dubai Millionaireand and Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud: Shadow Finance in the Gulf 

A Billionaire in Chains

Balvinder Singh Sahni, better known as Abu Sabah, once epitomized Dubai’s glitz. Famous for buying the…

On January 9, 2026, US President Donald Trump said that Washington would “hit Iran very, very hard where it hurts” if the Islamic Republic killed people protesting against the regime. Since then, at least 12000 demonstrators were murdered…

Martin Luther King was ahead of his time for understanding, unequivocally, that what makes a person significant or important is the “quality of his character,” and not his skin color.  That could be applied today to virtually every major…

Everyone is so busy.
Including me.

In the morning, I look at my calendar the way one looks at a map, trying to understand where the day might still open up. Is there a quiet pocket of twenty-five minutes to go swimming? Could I still pick up…