From here it is not very far to “greenhorn” meaning a new immigrant from a foreign country, although the word had to take one more intermediate step before this happened –- namely, to be applied to rural bumpkins moving to the city. A mid-18th-century Englishman arriving in London from the country wrote, for example, that…
We can’t tell you what Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said when he addressed Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century, a group of young Democrats better known as DL21C; the presidential hopeful’s campaign kept the May 20 speech in New York off the record. We can, however, tell you about how the speech was received. Speaking…
In the Talmud, there’s no ritual for going on welfare. For having sex for the first time. For recovering from a mastectomy. Or for going to a gay pride march. But today, some people wish to infuse these events with religious and cultural significance. By the thousands, they’ve been turning to the Web site, Ritualwell…
A decade ago, when the Democrats set out to reform healthcare, they turned to one person above all others: Ira Magaziner. The New England management consultant, charged in the early 1990s with helping then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton reform the nation’s healthcare system, had a reputation as a genius — at least until his proposals…
A group of young men in our community have started something called “the Chevra,” the mission of which is to perform good deeds 24 hours a day. It is like Hatzolah, but instead of saving people’s lives, they bail people out. Among the good deeds they perform are unlocking people’s car doors and fixing flat…
The last Democrat in the White House, President Clinton, hoped to make healthcare reform a centerpiece of his first administration. But the plan his office produced proved so mind-numbingly long, complex and abstruse that it became a symbol for everything that was wrong with “big government.” In 1994, his proposal was resoundingly defeated. For years,…
SHAVUOT In the Garden: Battery Park City Parks Conservancy horticulturalist Laura Steger leads a tour — for children and adults — through the Robert F. Wagner Jr. Park, sharing information about the garden’s blooming life and Shavuot, the harvest festival also known as the Feast of Weeks that ends the omer and celebrates Moses receiving…
There are reasons aplenty to be skeptical of the sudden Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic flurry. President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon have never shown enthusiasm for the sort of peace-making they now embrace. Their Palestinian partner, new Prime Minister Abu Mazen, barely clings to power. Their “road map” is full of inconsistencies. Extremists on all sides are…
In the world of media, as in the corporate sector as a whole, the trend is toward the concentration of ownership with ever fewer firms owning and controlling ever greater sectors of the economy. But, in the area of the media, the oligarchy (rule by the few) is, in a sense, a monopoly because a…
WASHINGTON — Activists on both sides of the debate over school vouchers are gearing up for a state-by-state battle in courts and legislatures nationwide. Observers attribute the rapidly expanding battleground to the Supreme Court’s decision last June permitting the use of government-funded vouchers to pay for parochial school tuition. The newest front in the policy…
Ethiopian activists and their allies are waging a multi-front protest against the Israeli government, the Jewish Agency for Israel and several American Jewish philanthropies. Thousands of demonstrators in Jerusalem this week pitched tents outside the prime minister’s office to protest the apparent collapse of a 4-month-old government plan to bring more than 18,000 languishing Ethiopians…
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