It's high time to face an unpleasant fact: President Barack Obama and Israel are not on the same page. This has been true ever since Obama took office in January 2009, but it was most recently apparent this May when the president ambushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an adversarial speech the day before Netanyahu's U.S. visit. In it,...
I was amused by a recent blog post by Adam Serwer titled "Is Bibi Anti-Israel?" In it, the author pointed out that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conditionally offered this month to negotiate with the Palestinians using the pre-1967 borders as a framework. Amazingly, there was no outcry by American Jews that Netanyahu was abandoning Israel by suggesting a return...
Growing up in Ardmore, my family always taught me to be a "do gooder." I remember instances throughout my childhood of seeing injustices and trying to figure out a way to fight them. So when I learned that much of Appalachia was paying the true cost of the rest of the country's need for cheap electricity through something called mountaintop...
When I was a little boy, my parents gave me a book called The Jew in American Sports. It was filled with sagas about Hank Greenberg and Sid Luckman and some low-weight boxing champs -- big names, but from an era even before my youth. I was part of that generation where our parents would point out significant Jews everywhere...
The whirlwind that follows tragedy is often a bewildering state that leaves us bereft of any structure, any sense of knowing or comfort. As our kishkes turn inside out longing for our loved ones and for the way it was, we eventually mourn and then learn how to move on. While I have counseled this professionally for many years, the...
Sivan 9, 5773
