Category: Science and Health

I was in Kibbutz Nir Oz the day it was announced that the bodies of Shiri, Ariel, and Kfir Bibas would be returned to Israel. More than 1 in 4 members of the community, including the Bibas family, were either killed or taken hostage on October 7. Both Hamas terrorists and Gazan civilians participated in […]

Trump’s critics give him too much credit. He’s neither evil nor calculating. He’s an impulsive power monger who’s obsessed with two things: not getting ripped off and closing deals. He got elected in large part because he convinced enough voters that it was high time America stopped getting ripped off, and as someone who’s an […]

The off-Broadway experience on everyone’s radar these days, surprisingly, is showing at the Center for Jewish History. In commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the death of Anne Frank, they have mounted an installation that includes a full-scale replica of the secret annex in Amsterdam where she, her family and a few others hid until […]

An article published on Ynet News early in 2025 pairs J. Robert Oppenheimer to nuclear developments in Israel. The article describes how the growing energy needs of technology data centers may push Israel to develop nuclear power plants. However, it is also a tacit reminder of Israel’s nuclear weapons capability. According to Emad Moussa, Oppenheimer […]

The Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) has agreed to a settlement with multiple Jewish organizations in which the district will suspend its ethnic studies courses until they’ve received public input and been rewritten. The lawsuit was initially filed in Sept. 2023 by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Louis Brandeis Center for […]

For more than a dozen years, Rabbi Sharon Brous, the founder and leader of the unique synagogue Ikar (Hebrew for “the heart of the matter”)  has been considered one of the most influential rabbis, and last year her first book, “The Amen Effect,” became a national best-seller. But as we reported last week in Part […]

You would be forgiven if this past week confused you about the state of antisemitism in America and what can, and what should not, be done about it. There was even a self-destructive reminder of how Jews themselves feel about what’s been happening around them—a crisis manifested in both the hatred of Jews, and Jewish […]

The classic response to antisemitism has always been education. Given widespread ignorance, the conventional wisdom is that education is the best treatment for the world’s oldest hatred. That makes sense, until it doesn’t. The thing about education is that we can control what we teach but we can’t control how people will react to what […]

One year, at the intense and highly competitive quiz night at the conference for the Association for Jewish Studies (we academic types really know how to party), I wrote the wrong answer to the literary softball question: “Who wrote ‘To be a Jew in the 20th Century’?” The answer was Muriel Rukeyser. (My office is […]