February 2012
1 post
Ken Starr's New Investigation
The rabbi began, “I have a special blessing-slash-prayer for Judge Starr.”
Early September 2010: fresh from a five-year stint as Dean of Pepperdine Law School, Baylor University’s newly anointed president Ken Starr celebrated the High Holidays with his Jewish colleagues. A former federal judge, though best known as independent counsel overseeing the Whitewater investigation and the Monica...
November 2011
1 post
Birthright Mic Check
I did my best to smell and look expensive, like someone who would normally come out on a Monday night to hear “venture capitalist and turn-around CEO Steven Pease,” author of a 622-page book called The Golden Age of Jewish Achievement. The program began with a complimentary light dinner, then the talk: “Why Jews are Disproportionately High Achievers.” This was the first in a series of Wall...
August 2011
1 post
The Boycott Wars
Once, in the bulk goods aisle of the Park Slope Food Coop, a wild-haired woman stood next to me and scrutinized the coffee-grinder settings. “I’m using it for an enema,” she explained. “It needs to be very fine.” I suggested the espresso grind.
This is exactly the kind of shopping experience I hoped for when I joined the Park Slope Food Coop in the fall of 2009: a realization of the eternal...
June 2011
2 posts
The Romance of Birthright Israel
The seekers are young, just beginning to face the disappointments of adulthood. Their journey is often marked by tears. They may weep while praying at the Western Wall, their heads pressed against the weathered stone, or at the Holocaust Museum, as they pass the piles of shoes of the dead. Others tear up in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl military cemetery, while embracing a handsome IDF soldier in the...
A dispatch from the the Promised Land: An...
May 2011
1 post
Flash Dance
Not long before Christmas, in a Best Buy in a St. Louis mall, 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein performed a synchronized song-and-dance number to the tune of “Telephone,” rocking black pants and a turtleneck in lieu of Lady Gaga’s metal-studded bra and crotch cover. Epstein, along with a cohort of mostly young women, urged the bewildered holiday shoppers to “hang up on...
November 2010
2 posts
Frequent Fliers
Over the past decade, the Family, a fundamentalist Christian movement, has spent over $120,000 sending members of Congress all over the world.
Some members of Congress make a point of working visits to Family friends into their official travel—Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.), and others have conducted Family business on taxpayer-funded trips. Others have relied on the...
In the fall of 2007, New York’s first Arabic-language public school was slated to open in Brooklyn. For a namesake, organizers chose the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, a pacifist, an immigrant to New York, and a Christian so obsessed with Jesus he often said the Son of God visited him in his dreams. With a name like Khalil Gibran International Academy, they thought, surely no one would mistake it...
August 2010
1 post
Jews for Jesus
Another New York summer has passed: gone are the warm nights of stoop sitting; gone are the free concerts and outdoor movies and endless scrambles to claim picnic blanket space; and gone, too, are the Jews for Jesus.
For the 36th straight year, Jews for Jesus traveled here for their “Summer Witnessing Campaign.” They prepared in June with a two-week training at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago,...
July 2010
2 posts
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: Russia’s most...
Israeli expo in NYC
At the Jewish Agency’s 2010 Aliyah Expo in New York last week, people asked one another, “When is your flight?”—no if’s about it. Many planned to move to a country that seems increasingly intent on ostracizing itself from the international community. And yet, during the four hours I spent at the Aliyah Expo, I heard just a single concern. “My husband would love to have a goat,” one woman...
April 2010
1 post
Notes from Bil'in
Upon the one-year anniversary of the killing of Bassem Abu Rahmeh, this is the news in Haaretz: “IDF won’t investigate death of Bil’in activist from tear gas grenade.”
The kind of tear gas canister that killed Bassem is heavy, shaped like a bullet and the size of a can of beans. Haitham Al-Khatib—a video journalist who hardly sleeps, always on-call to film the the IDF raids...
December 2009
2 posts
The Body of Christ, Now Germ-Free
Wired reports on the brewing intellectual property war over hygienic churchware:
“A Minnesota marketer of communion-wafer dispensers is accusing its former president of patent infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. (.pdf) … The handheld devices allow the dispensing of wafers without being touched by anybody but those receiving them. What’s more, the portable devices, according...
Deep Feeling, Remembered
Speaking at the New School, former believers Malcolm Gladwell, James Wood, and Christine Smallwood recounted growing up evangelical. Topics included: God, The Word, the Jewish intellectual monopoly, lamentations, and joy.
What remains in the absence of faith is the very question of secular life: how are we to feel deeply without access to the divine in everyday experience, warming our hearts...
November 2009
2 posts
To some young professionals, a routine night of...
Anatomy of a Sri Lankan Buffet Plate
Clockwise from the papadum: leeks, dhal, eggplant, chicken curry, potato, bitter gourd, coconut sambol, goat curry, and kingfish curry; mango and pineapple chutney, yellow rice (center). Each month, my eating club, the MTA Dining Car, treks to an outer borough for a feast. This time around, lured by an $11 Sunday buffet, we ferried to Tompkinsville, Staten Island (aka Little Sri Lanka). For the...
October 2009
1 post
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The New York Times reports that many...
September 2009
1 post
The MTA Dining Car: D/M/N/R to 36th Street, Sunset...
Each month, I help organize an eating club called the MTA Dining Car. Basically: we trek to an outer borough and feast. This month, we did a taco tour in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park—fully blog-ified on HuffPo.
Next stop: Sri Lankan food on Staten Island. Drop a line if you’d like to be added to the mailing list; it’s a more-the-merrier affair.
April 2009
7 posts
Brooklyn-based FEAST—Funding Emerging Art...
“Three Women and a Silent Friend”
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“Was this what it looked like? Had I been...
“What Do You Believe In?” — A...