God and the Big Bump
As a rabbinical student, I was required to defend anintellectual argument for my personal belief in God, aposition which my instructor thoroughly annihilated witha few well-placed philosophical thrusts.
Galilee Diary: Do It Yourself
Make for yourself a rabbi and acquire for yourself a colleague... -Mishnah Avot 1:6
Galilee Diary: Dogs
by Marc Rosenstein
(Originally published in Ten Minutes of Torah and Galilee Diary)
Galilee Diary: Play it again
Congress Delays Decision on Child Nutrition Reauthorization
Krugman: Potential Policy Options are all Terrible, and Such Small Portions
Jonathan Backer is and Eisendrath Legislative Assistant. He is a graduate of Columbia University.
Who can forget the opening lines of Annie Hall, when Woody Allen sums up his attitude towards life?
Who Dat? It's the CSA in NOLA!
83 is the New 13: Why Have a Second Bar Mitzvah?
Inspired by Stan, our congregation's 83-year-old bar mitzvah boy, I’m thinking that I may not wait until I turn 83 to recreate some part of my entry into adulthood, according to Jewish tradition, on an upcoming Friday night.
Galilee Diary: Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
(Langston Hughes, “Harlem”)
Recently I began to volunteer once a week, assisting the English literature teacher in a nearby Arab high school. I’ve known the teacher, and the principal, for many years, through arranging encounters for their students with Jewish visitors, and this seems like a good way to stay in touch and involved. My first assignment was to present a background lesson to two 10th-grade classes studying a poem by Langston Hughes (“the poet laureate of Harlem,” who died in 1967). This assignment meant covering slavery, emancipation, the Civil War, Jim Crow, and the civil rights struggle, in simple English, assuming almost no historical background, in 40 minutes. Interesting challenge.