To save Main Street, state lawmakers in the 1930s passed “fair trade” legislation that set floors for retail prices, protecting small-town manufacturers and retailers from big business’s economies of scale. These laws permitted manufacturers to[…]
As a point of strategy, it may behoove Democrats to embrace patriotic or nationalistic language — to insist that there is more than one way to make America great. As a matter of history, however,[…]
I have been obsessed lately with trying to draw distinctions between what we call the moral, the political, and the partisan. A conflation between these three – even as they live along the same spectrum[…]
In its transition from Joseph’s death to a new era, the book of Exodus records: A new king arose over Egypt, who did know Joseph (Exodus 1:8). This “new king” proceeded to enslave the Jews.[…]
I find Pesach stunning for its integrating the particular redemption story of a particular people into a moral message that is universal; or the reverse, routing a universal story into the particular story of the[…]
I am not enamored by the politicization of Seder symbols into clear public policy directives; they do not convince people not already marshaled to the cause and they reinforce a conflation of the twin discourses[…]
The core pedagogies of the Haggadah are asking questions and telling stories. Real questions – those that are open-ending and that invite people to think – exhibit the humility of curiosity and create space for[…]
In democracies, elections come and go rather frequently and the day after, the rain in Spain still falls mainly on the plain, which is to say that votaries of winning candidates are not walking on[…]
So why don’t more organizations post salary ranges? Is it inertia? Are organizations embarrassed by how little they pay? Is it because they think it’s a good negotiating tactic? These reasons are all garbage. The[…]
“Weaponize” was born in the 1950s as military jargon. It was an instantly comprehensible neologism, useful and compact and inflected with the managerial style then in vogue. “To turn into a weapon” sounds clumsy and[…]