Sunday September 15, 2019 | 14 Elul 5779
When I was editor for the daily newspaper in Racine, I noticed a bad habit among us journalists. I call it the we-got-it moment and it’s when, journalistically speaking, you fall off your game. It works like this. Big news breaks. Maybe it’s a terrible shooting or a political figure stepping down. You rush […]
Walking into the Blacklist exhibit at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee, visitors may wonder what the red scare of the 1950s and 60s has to do with Jewish-American culture in the upper Midwest. Rather than answering that question directly, however, the temporary exhibit offers the tools of historical inquiry: original sources and probing questions. Blacklist […]
Visitors to the “Blacklist” exhibition at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee will be impressed by its evocative audio-visual presentations and engaging interactive displays. Ellie Gettinger, the museum’s curator, deserves high praise for designing an appealing exhibition, which immediately captures and sustains attention. Undeniably, “Blacklist” has been professionally and artfully crafted. Above all, the exhibition vividly […]
Tragic. Traumatic. Miraculous. These words describe my family’s past decade. When our seemingly healthy 14-year-old daughter Laura died within days of being diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor, my husband Ron and I were shocked and distraught. Our sheltered family life in Bayside wasn’t supposed to unfold this way. We were overcome by the […]
The most important thing for us is to have the right amount of fear. Some of you may know that those words are a variation of the end of a quote attributed to the legendary Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. Here is one common translation: “The world is a narrow bridge and the important […]
In a 17-minute podcast, Sam Harris delivers one of my favorite defenses of Israel. He’s a surprise source of support for the Jewish state. Harris is one of America’s leading public atheists, an intellectual and a philosopher with a podcast that’s downloaded one million times per episode, according to reports. He’s written five New […]
Israel and Palestine. For many in the Jewish community, these two words conjure up a slew of images, memories and feelings. Knowing those feelings is a good idea for anyone embarking on this year’s Milwaukee Jewish Community Read, Yossi Klein Halevi’s “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.” It will prove helpful in encounters with ideas […]
When the photo of Baraboo High School students posing before prom, arms raised in a Nazi salute, hit the Internet, the response was widespread outrage. That outrage was well placed; the image of a large group of boys in central Wisconsin with their arms raised in the gesture of obedience to Adolf Hitler is […]
Weeks have passed since the shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. What do we do now? Of course, we remember and memorialize those who were murdered. Of course, we reevaluate and improve security measures at our institutions. But those responses do not address the question that I am asking. I am asking what we should do when the […]
President Trump’s visit Oct. 30 to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh – where an anti-Semitic gunman murdered 11 Jews gathered in prayer Oct. 27 – was an important gesture that symbolized national mourning and unity in the face of a horrific tragedy. The visit showed President Trump’s deep concern for the welfare […]
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