Category: Other

Recently, I received a phone call from my Bubby’s younger brother, Sol Waxman. Over the years, we have had a number of conversations about the pogroms his parents went through in Europe after World War One. However, this time my Uncle…

Eliyahu Hanavi.

Our annual pesach guest.

He is the man who never dies, and so, like the Jewish people, he is forever evolving. His persona, and the legends about him, morphing along with us as our long, winding history demands.

In the dark…

I really enjoyed a new biography of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan (1881-1983) – the founder of Reconstructionism, bete-noir of American Orthodoxy, and the only person to have been formally put in Herem in North America. The author is Jenna Weissman…

At 7:30am, there are no children on the bus.

Not one.

Because there is no school. There is only “the situation” — that polite, almost apologetic phrase we use so we don’t have to say the words war and Iran before coffee, like…

Margaret Laurence’s time in British Somaliland between 1950 and 1952 marked a formative period in her development as a writer. Although she is best known for her Canadian fiction set on the prairies of Manitoba, her early years in the Horn…

That memory has not disappeared. It has shifted.

Today, one of the most charged places on earth is the Strait of Hormuz – apparently – is a narrow corridor through which flows much of the world’s oil. Tankers pass, fleets hover,…

In the mid‑2010s, I lived on Admirala Geprata, a quiet street in central Belgrade just blocks from Nemanjina, where the bombed‑out Yugoslav General Staff complex loomed like a scar that would never heal across the city’s main artery….

For nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran ran a sophisticated terror franchise. It armed militias, financed massacres, and strangled its neighbors, all while hiding behind proxies and plausible deniability. Israel warned loudly,…

Missile attacks from Iran and Lebanon have struck towns and villages across Israel, affecting Jews and Arabs alike. The threat is shared. Vulnerability — and the ability to cope with it — is not.

Alongside the damage, another phenomenon…