Yom Kippur

For most of the Jewish world, Shavuot, the Jewish feast of weeks, was observed about two weeks ago, on May 19 and 20.

For some residents of Israel, Shavuot came this week, on May 30.

The few thousand members of the Black Hebrews community in Dimona and surrounding Negev towns celebrated Shavuot on Sunday with singing and dancing.

Q:  I'm about to get married to the woman of my dreams. She knows I was married before; what she doesn't know is that the marriage broke up because I was a schmuck. Ethically speaking, how much do I need to tell her?

You have a right to privacy, but a relationship that begins with massive deception has little chance of long term success.

In the topsy-turvy post-Holocaust world, genocide never ended and the Holocaust itself became a brand name. Yom HaShoah competed with Yom Kippur for mourners. A museum in Washington, D.C., doubled as a Jewish Mount Rushmore. And Anne Frank was adopted by every culture on earth as a metaphor for adolescence interrupted. Elie Wiesel, a precocious, sensitive boy from a remote region of Transylvania, ended up as a Nobel laureate, a worldwide celebrity, and an honored guest on “Oprah.”

Who would have imagined all that when the death camps were liberated in 1945?