Being little more than a husk of keratin hacked off the head of a ram, the shofar is not a very versatile instrument. Because there’s no real mechanism to alter pitch within the hollow horn, the burden is on the blower, who can modulate tones using his or her lips, teeth or tip-of-the tongue. For…
Little did I suspect that Bob Woodward, my closest college friend, would bring down a president and become what many people have called “the greatest investigative reporter of all time.” I think of him often, especially now with “Fear,” his book about the Trump White House, which is being published on September 11. I first…
My grandfather had a surprise for me. Seven years after buying his 1971 Buick LeSabre, he’d finally decided to get with the times and install an eight-track cassette player under the car’s dashboard. This in itself was not surprising, as he was a talented amateur pianist and violinist who genuinely loved music, even if his…
Yuval Noah Harari is concerned about our bad decisions. Whereas the Oxford-educated Israeli historian and academic’s past work examined the far-flung past and the way-off future, his third book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (Spiegel & Grau), brings his insights to the here-and-now into a call to action. Harari believes that unless we heed…
It wasn’t just the growth of intermarriage, you know. Or the dramatically shrinking Conservative movement. Or the fact that non-Orthodox Jews were having fewer and fewer children. The real dismaying headline of the Pew Research Center’s Portrait of Jewish Americans,, which this October will have been released five years ago, was the finding that young…
Rabbi Rachel Cowan has died after a battle with cancer. Here’s how we profiled the remarkable “mother of Jewish healing” last year. Rabbi Rachel Cowan moves slowly these days. Her energy lags. She can’t read like she used to. She’s lost most of her eyesight, and sometimes she bumps into things as she makes her…
Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, a global Jewish leader who officiated at Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner’s wedding, was aware of multiple instances of sexual misconduct by educators affiliated with the Upper East Side school he ran for 50 years, which is considered one of the best private Jewish academies in the country. This is according to…
By his own admission, Stanley S. Rosenfeld, a Jewish educator who worked primarily in New York City and Rhode Island, sexually abused “hundreds” of children — nearly all middle school-aged boys — during his five-decade career. From a beloved summer camp in New Jersey, to elite Orthodox schools in New York, to a small Conservative…
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