By J.J. Goldberg
As they used to say at the old Yiddish Forward,
hold the back page!Read More
By J.J. Goldberg
What do we know about the tornado that hit the Oklahoma City suburbs on Monday? And what can we learn from it? Specifically, how bad was it? How does it compare with other tornadoes? And was it related to climate change, as Democratic Senators
Sheldon Whitehouse and
Barbara Boxer are charging?
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By J.J. Goldberg
If you don’t follow Philologos, the Forward’s inimitable language columnist, you’re missing one of the outstanding intellectual joys in contemporary Jewish life. I don’t say that idly. Week after week for 20-plus years, with an astonishing combination of erudition, curiosity and wit, he’s used readers’ inquiries into the origins of words and phrases to explore some lesser-known byways of history, culture, philosophy and sacred text. There’s nearly always a Jewish jumping off point, but oh, where he jumps to: Slavic, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese and any number of other civilizations. The bottom line is how interconnected we all are. When Ben Zoma said in Pirkei Avot (drawing on Psalm 119),
“mikol melamdai hiskalti” (I have gained wisdom from all my teachers), he had to be thinking of Philologos.
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By J.J. Goldberg
Fresh from her controversial April 3
paean to Palestinian stone-throwing, Haaretz’s Ramallah-based bad girl Amira Hass is making new waves with her Friday May 17
report about a group of “senior Fatah members” (the headline called them “senior officials”) who are calling for “the establishment of one democratic country in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”
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By J.J. Goldberg
Besides throwing the Obama administration off its stride, the three scandals roiling Washington and the 24-hour cable news channels have one thing in common: They’re shrinking steadily as more information becomes available. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein
ably deconstructs them in his Wonkblog: the IRS-Tea Party scandal involves a group of employees in the IRS Cincinnati office who “started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.” (I’ll have more to say about this after the jump.)
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Claims Conference Chief Knew of $57M Holocaust Fraud Probe Earlier 
Rama Burshtein Offers Rare Glimpse of Orthodox World
Top Dog: Who Makes the Best Kosher Hot Dog in America?
'War' With Ultra-Orthodox at Kotel? Bring It On
What 'Jews a Race' Debate Means for Israel
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