In defiance of the odds on a scale of, say, holding a royal flush, four of the nine players who will be sitting at the final table at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas are Jewish. “It’s probably a fluke,” said Jeff Shulman, one of the competitors vying for the $8.6 million top…
A Tight Squeeze It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book: When planning an event, make sure the room is a little too small for the number of people you are expecting; that way, the room will always be full. But as J Street began its inaugural national conference October 26 at a Washington…
Recently, my 5-year-old son, Jeremy, began waking up at night. One evening before bed, I asked him why he had trouble sleeping. He said he was afraid of monsters. To calm him, I explained that there were no monsters, but Jeremy insisted that the monsters were real. Then, I responded with the first idea that…
The donors who have sent more than 200,000 young Jews on free trips to Israel over the last decade have been rewarded with a bit of reassuring news: Those returning from the trips are more likely than their peers to marry other Jews. According to a new study about the long-term effects of the Taglit-Birthright…
On Tuesday November 3, His Royal Highness Prince Philip will host over 200 guests for lunch at Windsor Castle, the 900-year-old palace that serves as an official residence of his and Queen Elizabeth’s. But this lunch will be noticeably different from the roasted quail and crème fraîche typical of castle meals. Instead, the menu is…
NEWS ITEM: “The Running Rabbis” is a group of young rabbis, cantors and rabbinical and cantorial students. They raise money for charities by participating in marathons. So far they have contributed almost $30,000 to various worthy causes. Ten rabbis in a marathon! A truly rare phenomenon! They run each race with bonhomie To raise cold…
Becoming a parent has brought great joy to my life. It has also forced me to struggle with the troublesome feeling of regret. When my son was an infant, I was working (more than) full-time as a congregational rabbi and regretted not being able to spend more time with him. Soon after my daughter was…
New Jersey and Virginia traditionally are the only states to vote for governor in the year after a presidential election, and so they are considered a referendum of sorts for a new administration in Washington. That’s one reason Democrats are so concerned this year about mobilizing usually reliable Jewish voters in these close races. But…
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has never worn his Jewish identity on his sleeve, but that doesn’t seem to have hurt him among New York City’s Jewish voters. In his successful 2005 re-election bid, he captured upward of 70% of the Jewish vote, according to exit polls, up from a little more than half of the Jewish…
As a consequence of the military action in Gaza and to please a new administration in Washington, Egypt has recently stepped up efforts to crack down on smugglers who use a network of tunnels to transport weapons to Hamas. This assessment comes from Israeli analysts and from informed sources who say that while Hamas is…
Florida Democrat Robert Wexler’s recent decision to leave Congress and join a Washington policy center dealing with Middle East peace left many in this status-crazed city baffled. It is not every day that a successful politician chooses to resign midterm. An aftershock was also felt in the smaller think-tank community, where the entry of a…
