Thane Rosenbaum
By Thane Rosenbaum
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Opinion The Surfside tragedy recalls South Florida’s long hold on the Jewish imagination and reality
(JTA “”)) — Until a 13-story building inexplicably collapsed in the middle of the night, placing the whereabouts and lives of 159 residents in doubt, few gave Surfside, Florida, very much thought before last week. The town was, after all, a South Florida misnomer. There’s no surfing. The white caps on the Atlantic Ocean never…
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Culture An Ambitious Book Helps Jews Navigate the Complexities of Going Home
This was originally in the print edition of February 20, 1998, and was posted online in December 2016. For some people, going home is a complicated matter — particularly after a long absence. But while some journeys of return are fraught with deep emotion and ambivalence, others are more like an odyssey, an obstacle course…
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News On 50th Anniversary of His Trial, Eichmann’s Case Still Brands Israel
The early 1960s was more than simply the revelry of TV’s “Mad Men.” It was also a time when international justice held court, and a certifiable madman found himself at the center of the world’s judgment. In 1961, a young American president read James Bond novels, while high-stakes espionage dominated popular culture and fed global…
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Opinion A Boycott Spreads
You know the delegitimization campaign targeting Israel has reached new heights of absurdity when the rallying cry against the Jewish state is now being waged with the help of the chickpea. What a low blow — Israel’s enemies are hitting where it really hurts: hummus. Hummus, that pasty spread without which pita has no purpose,…
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News In the Courtroom: Torment and Dante’s Hell
Joseph Stalin once said that a single death is a tragedy; 1 million, a statistic. The same is true, it turns out, for financial ruin. Whether the final tally turns out to be $16 billion or $65 billion, the sheer enormity of the fraud perpetrated by Bernard Madoff is too abstract for anyone other than…
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Culture Yeah, but the Book Is Better
Whenever a film is adapted from a favorite novel, serious readers of fiction are prone to say, “Yeah, but the book is better.” True partisans of the written page are always in conflict with those who like their stories cinematically revealed, projected onto wide screens that illuminate the darkness and pierce the quiet with Dolby…
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Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
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News They texted about Torah and mitzvahs. Feds say they were insider trading
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Culture At Eurovision, Israel’s near triumph shows the limits of tolerance
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Opinion I run The Jewish Theological Seminary. Here’s the real story about President Isaac Herzog speaking at our commencement
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Opinion The San Diego imam defended Oct. 7. His mosque still deserves our help
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Sports An op-ed compared an NBA team to Israel as underdog success stories. Then the threats poured in.
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Theater In ‘Waiting for Godot,’ the tragedy and comedy of the Jewish experience