the Jewish Week

The 15 families belonging to the Norwich Jewish Center, a dwindling, mostly elderly congregation in central New York, expected to celebrate Passover with a community seder inside their synagogue, as they do every year.

More than twenty years ago, when my now twenty-five-year-old son was in Nursery School, I learned how little I understood about how the minds of young children work.

1980 was a golden year for Jewish Republicans. That November Ronald Reagan won nearly 40 percent of the Jewish vote for the presidency, a modern record for the GOP and a mark that they have never come close to achieving since then.

On the occasion of the 137th birthday of the man who already early on in his lifetime was bestowed with the title the National Hebrew Poet, a look at how his views changed toward America after visiting in 1926.

Last week, the world marked 65 years since Auschwitz was liberated. The unique horror and scope of the camp’s mechanization of death has made it a symbol of the Holocaust, prompting many countries in recent years to adopt January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
 

The one-two punch of Debra Nussbaum Cohen’s front-page article in The Jewish Week (RCA Seen Caving on Conversions, February 29) and Gershom Gorenberg’s piece in the Sunday Magazine of The New York Times (Proving You’re a Jew, March 2) serves as a painful reminder of one of Israel’s most vexing problems.

Just a few hours ago, an Arab terrorist (maybe two?) made his way into Yeshivat Mercaz Harav in Jerusalefom and opened fire, killing at least seven Yeshiva students and wounding many others. It doesn’t take a political scientist to attribute this heinous act of barbarism to some form of revenge for Israel’s actions recently in Gaza. Significant numbers of civilians were killed in those actions, and the conventional wisdom in that part of the world is “blood for blood.”

What are we to make of Elliot Spitzer’s dramatic fall from grace? How can it be that the man who was swept into office by a record plurality of votes, running as the Mr. Clean who “judged every decision before him simply on the basis of whether it was right or wrong,” as one of his campaign ads suggested, could be so very, very wrong on so basic a principle?

“Spitzer-fatigue” has set in. For an eclectic variety of reasons, not least of which is the tawdriness and blatant hypocrisy of what Governor Spitzer was engaged in, most people appear to have had enough. It’s time to move on, they say, and to let him and his family deal with the detritus of his epic fall from grace.

By and large, I agree. There is little to be gained by rehashing what is known, and speculating about what is not. True enough. But personally, I don’t think that there’s been enough discussion about it with our children.