Samuel G. Freedman
By Samuel G. Freedman
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Culture How I Learned Shiva
Forty-one years ago this coming week, I walked with sleepless eyes and a weary heart to the front door of my childhood home, where an unexpected visitor had just shown up for my mother’s shiva. If I recall correctly, he was wearing faded jeans, a denim jacket and hippie work boots —his usual outfit —…
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Culture Atticus Finch, Harper Lee’s Father And The Jewish Settler Movement
One day in September 1933, shortly after having been bailed out of jail, a middle-aged, partially paralyzed black man named Dennis Cross answered a knock at his front door in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His visitors, pretending to be police officers, were in fact white civilians, and they were incensed that Cross had been accused of sexually…
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Culture On Joshua Harmon’s ‘Admission’ To An Argument
During the summer of 1973, the renowned civil rights attorney Joseph Rauh, Jr. delivered the featured speech at the annual fund-raising dinner of the Milwaukee Jewish Council. The audience, Rauh noted, surely expected him to address the burgeoning Watergate scandal, the attempt by Republican operatives tied to President Richard Nixon to break into Democratic National…
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Opinion The Only Ones Waging A War On Christmas Are Evangelicals
When Donald Trump swaggered to a Southern podium just before the recent Senate election in Alabama, trying to rally his base behind the right-wing zealot and accused pedophile Roy Moore, the stage was decorated with banners declaring “Merry Christmas.” People in the crowd held up green letters spelling out the salutation. A vast banner with…
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Opinion We Jews Were Once Dreamers. We Must Stand Up For DACA.
A few days before Donald Trump chose to demolish the Deferred Action for Chilhdood Arrivals program that provided legal refuge for young, undocumented immigrants, I happened to be reading through the rather copious file on anti-Semitism maintained by the Minnesota Jewish Council in the 1940s. My interest was historical research for a book, but one…
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Opinion Netanyahu Is Abandoning American Jews — Because He Can
Several days after the First Zionist Congress concluded in 1897, Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, assessed its effect in his diary. “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State,” he wrote, referring to the Swiss site of the meeting. “If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps…
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Opinion Hand-Me-Downs: The Lasting Power Of A Father’s Sweatshirt
One afternoon late in the summer of 1956, I spoke my first words. “Down water,” I told my parents, and that terse announcement meant that I wanted to toddle along the path from our rented summer cabin in upstate New York to the glistening shoreline of Lake George. I know of those words and that…
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Opinion Like Nixon, Trump Carries Baggage To The Middle East
In this season of final exams, let’s take a brief test on American political history. It consists of a scenario, a question, and four possible answers. If you feel a wave of déjà vu as you proceed, don’t panic. It’s perfectly appropriate. Here we go. You are the president of the United States. You or…
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