This is not a post, dear reader, so much as a referral.  On November 5 Tablet Magazine ran a feature the editors there asked me to prepare.  It can be accessed at tabletmagazine.com.  I foretold of this in my October 2 post, “Once Again, Jews Is News.”I sent my copy in on October 1, right […]

Yesterday’s press carried the results of a Pew poll on “identity” issues among American Jews. The New York Times entitled its page A11 take, written by Laurie Goodstein, “Poll Shows Major Shift In Identity of U.S. Jews”—read it for yourself to get the full flavor of the story.Now, those who have made their way through […]

The media fawned over the Kellogg-Briand Pact, too, you know.

I said in a recent post that juxtaposition can sometimes qualify as serendipity. It’s now just happened again.Last week I got a letter from my doctor of the past dozen years informing me that he was changing his practice’s modus operandi.  He’s joining some new group that offers direct email and telephone access to patients, […]

In the weekend  newspapers one can find obituaries for “Rabbi Philip Berg”, dead at 86. The New York Times obit headline credits Berg as follows: “Updated Jewish Mysticism.”“Updated”, huh? Well, that’s one way to describe the shenanigans of the huckster who “ministered” all the way to the bank to the likes of Madonna, Demi Moore, […]

George Bernard Shaw once quipped that “if you laid all the economists in the world end to end they still would not reach a conclusion.” If Shaw were still around he might amend his observation with “except when they do and it’s wrong.” Or, reading a certain article in Friday’s Washington Post, he might opt […]

I began my last post on Syria, from September 11, with a quip-like protest of sorts: that every time I finish writing about some wild and wooly development in the U.S. “Syria crisis” portfolio, another even weirder one comes along at a speedy clip whose evident purpose is to provide a safety net for the […]

It has been barely more than a week since I wrote on Syria and U.S. policy, so-called, toward that issue. I started back on September 3 with an expression of surprise that things could possibly have gotten crazier since having written on August 30. So what am I to say now by way of introduction, […]

Little did I suspect when I put down my pen on August 30, having finished “Painted into a Corner, Obama Ponders Cosmetic Strikes”, that yet another self-inflicted verbal wound from the White House could possibly make the crisis of U.S. Syria policy even worse. I guess I misunderestimated the man. President Obama’s decision to go […]

It is often remarked, mainly by frustrated parents and disrespected teachers, that two wrongs do not make a right. But then what do they make? The scolds never tell us that. Well, judging from the skein of events, now more than two years old, that appear to be leading to a U.S.-led attack on Syria, […]