Category: Science and Health

As the clock winds down to Tuesday night when we will presumably learn who will be our next president, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on a political truth that is relevant regardless of who wins. And few things are more relevant these days than the long-term erosion of the political center in America. […]

More than 1,000 prominent figures from literature and entertainment have signed an open letter organized by the nonprofit Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), to oppose boycotts “of Israeli and Jewish writers, publishers, authors, book festivals, and literary agencies, along with those who support, work with, or platform them.” The signatories include Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize […]

Do they think we’re stupid? Do they think they can single out only one country in the world for an artistic boycott and get away with it? Maybe they’ve concluded that when that country is the Jewish state, they can never get in trouble. And maybe they’re right. How else to explain the idiotic temper […]

As we observe the 11th anniversary of the passing of Rav Ovadia Yosef z”l (3 Heshvan), we do so in the midst of a deep void in rabbinic leadership in Israel.  When I say “Rabbinic Leadership,” I don’t mean rabbis who can deliver beautiful sermons or write thought-provoking essays. I mean Chief Rabbis, whose responsibility […]

As the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers square off in this year’s World Series, old-timers recall the first time the two teams met in the Fall Classic, in 1941, a contest that involved one of baseball’s most famous plays. But that World Series was also connected to a long-forgotten episode in the controversy […]

In summer 2010, rabbis led Nathan Hochman and his son Tyler into a small apartment in Sderot, Israel, belonging to a man who lost his leg in a Hamas attack but could not afford a functioning wheelchair. It was one stop in a journey across Israel for Tyler’s bar mitzvah project of raising funds for […]

From: ARITHMETIC ON THE FRONTIER: No proposition Euclid wrote No formulae the textbooks know Will turn the bullet from your coat Onward the tulwar’s downward blow *** A scrimmage at a border station A canter down some dark defile Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail. – Kipling No, O Best Beloved, […]

Wikipedia editors have decided to impose a near total ban on the use of the “Hamas-run” qualifier in articles citing the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers. A formal discussion known as a Request for Comment (RfC) was launched in July; in RfCs, editors put in their “!votes” supporting their stated position on a contested issue and […]

People tend to assume that everyone is more or less the same around the world— that members of other societies all think like us, have the same values, yearn for the same things.  After all, they’ll say, everyone presumably hopes to live in peace and security with basic notions of justice. Yet, having just commemorated […]