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Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, Foreskin Man, Vulva Girl and the Two-Thirds of...
You know that feeling when there is so much going on, so much you have to do, so many different threads that you need to keep weaving together, or balls in the air that you can’t let drop, or spinning...
View ArticleThe Separation of Church and State in Early 19th Century England
When my brother-in-law died a couple of years ago, I inherited from him a pristine set of The World’s Orators, a multivolume collection of “the greatest orations of the world’s history,” edited by Guy...
View ArticleBlogging My Summer Classes: Literature of the Holocaust
I have just finished reading the first set of essays written by my students in ENG 261, Literature of the Holocaust. The prompt asked them to consider whether or not they think there is an obligation...
View ArticleBlogging My Summer Classes: Changing Times and Words You’re Not Supposed to Say
My wife and I went last night to a farewell gathering for one of her cousins, who is moving with her husband to California. We were at Bar 13 in Manhattan, a place I havent been to since I gave a...
View Article“Even Nice Jewish Girls Have Vibrators,” from Jezebel
This piece, by Sarah Tuttle-Singer, will make you plotz: But then, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, the rabbi yanked the drawer open, and in the process activated the iRabbit’s on-switch....
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Our Loving Each Other Would Not Be Now The Obstacle That It Was Then
This article in The New York Times, by Choe Sang-Hun, fascinates me: [Jasmine] Lee, 35, who was born Jasmine Bacurnay in the Philippines, made history in April when she became the first naturalized...
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Farid al-Din Attar: A Reading Journal 1
That mystical experience exists outside of language is axiomatic, and if it exists outside of language, then it also must exist outside the network of power relations, ineluctably embedded in language,...
View ArticleIs Hamas Considering Recognition Of Israel? — from Al-Monitor
From a very interesting article by Shlomi Eldar on Al-Monitor, which is a very useful source of information if you follow what’s going on in the Middle East: “Reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah is...
View ArticleOne of My Favorite Poems by Saadi of Shiraz
I’ve been thinking about this poem a lot lately, because what it says could easily have been labeled heresy by the authorities of Saadi’s time, which was 13th century Iran, and an accusation of heresy...
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What’s So Often Missing from Debates about Routine Infant Penile Circumcision
Over at Feministe, Jill has written a post called “How Intactivists Are Ruining the Debate on Circumcision” in which she complains, quite reasonably, that “Every time female genital cutting is...
View ArticleJohn Whitbeck, GOP Candidate for Congress, Makes an Anti-Semitic Joke
This is almost a week old, but someone posted it to Facebook today. The joke is one on which a representative of the Jewish people presents the new pope with a bill for the last supper,...
View Article“How Do You Get a Jewish Girl’s Number? Lift Up Her Sleeve:” Antisemitism in...
Update: Governor Cuomo orders an investigation. According to an article by Benjamin Weiser in today’s New York Times, “Swastikas, Slurs and Torments in Town’s Schools,” that was just one of the...
View ArticleThis is (Potentially) a VERY Big Deal: Hamas drops call for destruction of...
ETA: When I first read this article in the Guardian, I carelessly did not check the date, which is January 2006. So it is not quite the big deal that it would have been had Hamas made this decision...
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Reading Journal: Verses of Forgiveness, by Myriam Antaki — 1
I started a new novel yesterday, Verses of Forgiveness, by Myriam Antaki and translated from the French by Marjolin de Jager. Antaki is a Syrian novelist who writes in French. Verses of Forgiveness,...
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Reading Journal: Verses of Forgiveness, by Myriam Aantaki — 2
I continue to be fascinated with this book—part 1 of this reading journal is here—and with the effort Ahmed (the narrator) makes, even while he is planning a suicide attack against Israel, to imagine...
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What I’m Reading: Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism
Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, edited by David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, has been on my shelf since I bought it in the late 1990s—the book was published in...
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More from Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism
This is from the introduction by David Biale: Standing somewhere between the dominant position of the white majority and the marginal position of peoples of color, Jews respond with ambivalence to the...
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from “The Melting Pot and Beyond,” by David Biale
Continuing my excerpting from Insider/Outsider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, this is from the first essay in the book, “The Melting Pot and Beyond,” by David Biale, a fascinating look at the...
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