…as VHS technology became widely available in the mid-1980s, synagogues started screening “Tisha be-Av videos” throughout the afternoon. These are professionally-produced programs that focus on the Holocaust, the tragic points on Jewish history, and/or the[…]
These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise[…]
Anderson explains the use of language and symbols that help reinforce communal identity and unity. Online Jewish communities also provide these types of symbols and language. For example, the Orthodox movement uses pictures of a[…]
Archaeological evidence of beer-making is often hard to come by because most of the tools used in beer production — such as mortars, querns and winnowing baskets—are often linked to bread-making, and the possible connection[…]
The most successful ownage finds hubristic targets, people who think they know more than they do. But ownage is itself a hubristic act — it turns knowledge into a tool for exploiting another person’s lack[…]
Leaks are most often an outsider’s tool, and they look different from a vantage of power. As a candidate, Trump mentioned WikiLeaks frequently and approvingly at rallies, in interviews and in two out of three[…]
You do not hear “win-win” much lately. One of the loudest political messages of the past year, across the entire ideological spectrum, has been that all promises of balance and mutual gain are actually humiliating[…]
Zionism — and, here, I mean especially the muscular Zionism of the Six-Day War, the Zionism of power and permanence, with its hints of completing the narrative of Jewish unsettledness—asks so much of us. This[…]
“Silencing critics” is the beating heart of today’s “winning.” This is largely because your critics are not, in fact, competing with you; they have no formal power over you, are rarely seeking any and tend[…]
Trump may operate a twenty-first-century Twitter machine, but he is still a frontier-era drummer peddling snake oil, juniper tar, and Dr. Tabler’s Buckeye Pile Cure for profit from the back of a dusty wagon. As[…]