I grew up in Monsey, New York, where schnorrers of all kinds go door to door, asking for help paying for everything from a daughter’s wedding to major surgery to yeshiva tuition to something as basic as feeding many mouths. The busiest times come when Shabbat approaches, on Thursday evenings and Friday afternoons. I never…
As a Jewish Soviet immigrant living in a tony New York City suburb, I don’t always fit in. Smalltalk in our WASPy town tends to center around real estate prices, traffic, and sports scores. Even the Jewish moms have impossibly shiny hair and perfect, glossy nails, their toned bodies forever clad in yoga pants. My…
In Lenny Bruce’s terms, Han Solo always struck me as the most goyish of the “Star Wars” heroes. And in the new film “Solo,” he seems even more so. Recall (or, for a younger generation, come and learn) that for the outlaw comedian Lenny Bruce, Jewishness was a matter of sensibility more than religion or…
Recently, AmericanJewish day schools celebrated Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, with the usual activities: falafel and pita for lunch, make-your-own-Israeli-flag, come into school dressed in blue and white, and so on. And yet in many day schools around the world, while the girls assembled for Israeli folk dancing, the boys were steered towards Israeli-style ‘army…
On April 12, 1930, a Zionist zoologist, his Syrian guide, a local sheikh and a group of hired laborers gathered in a wheat field outside Aleppo, Syria. They started digging. Hours passed without incident, save for the destruction of a fair portion of a local farmer’s crop. Undeterred, they continued excavating until, at last, the…
Last fall, officials with a shadowy Israeli government agency started knocking on the doors of America’s leading Jewish institutions. They came offering money with few strings attached. They wanted American Jewish institutions to help them fight the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement by running “missions” to Israel for influencers, something some of them were doing…
In late April, my sister and I returned to Yorkshire, in the north of England, for a brief visit to explore what we could of our mother’s roots. She died nearly 13 years ago, and for almost a decade prior, Alzheimer’s disease had progressively clouded her ability to recall much about her life. I regret…
I last spoke with Philip about a week before his death. A few days earlier, I had emailed him the tape that I discovered of the 1962 Yeshiva University symposium that he’d remember always as a crucial turning point — one, in equal measure, dreadful and indispensable. It was just the sort of experience that,…
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