Mathematician Nassim Taleb popularized the term “black swan effect” to refer to the kinds of big phenomena one never thought would happen and that have a potentially catastrophic outcome. 

The origins of the expression date backs to the second century CE when the Roman poet Juvenal referred to “a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan,” as the Romans had only encountered white swans. A complete biological theory was developed to explain the swans’ singular coloring – that is, until the 17th century, when Dutch mariners discovered black swans in Australia, thereby rendering the paradigm obsolete in the blink of a black eye.

While Taleb may not have come up with the term “black swan,” he applied it to statistically unexpected events of such large magnitude that they profoundly affect history. A small number of black swans, Taleb says, can explain just about everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions to elements of our personal lives.

Taleb’s black swans can be characterized by a triplet: rarity, extreme impact and retrospective predictability.

  • Rarity: A black swan event is an outlier that exists beyond the realm of normal expectations. Nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
  • Extreme impact: The Black Plague of the Middle Ages is frequently cited here. In the modern age, Covid-19 serves a similar role, since the pandemic arrived unexpectedly and transformed society.
  • Retrospective predictability: Human nature prompts us to concoct after-the-fact explanations for how a seemingly inexplicable black swan event could occur. If we can predict a black swan, the thinking goes, we might be able to better manage it if it happens again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about black swans as Rosh Hashana approaches this year, just days before the one-year anniversary of October 7, the Middle East’s most infamous black swan of the last year. 

The events of. Oct. 7 were rare (hopefully), had extreme impact (Israeli society has changed drastically in the 12 months since), and we are now in the phase of trying to make sense (after the fact) of what happened on that dark day and the subsequent unleashing of unbridled antisemitism around the world.

What Oct. 7 taught us is that everything taken for granted can be flipped with little or no warning. That’s a message in keeping with the High Holyday season liturgy, which hints at the existence of black swans. 

On Rosh Hashana, we pray that our actions over the past year will warrant inscription in the Book of Life, while at the same time admitting that we have little control over our fates and that black swan-inspired change can happen on a dime when we least anticipate it.

Black swan events are everywhere. 

  • When a soldier or civilian is killed, everything changes radically for his or her family. Retroactively trying to understand the “why” behind the death is in keeping with black swan theory.
  • A cancer diagnosis frequently comes out of the blue; it immediately changes the way you approach life, increases your awareness of the imminence of death, while reorienting your personal and professional priorities.
  • When the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, everything changed – for the people who died, of course, but also the long-term direction of nuclear warfare.
  • Natural disasters – an earthquake, tornado or tsunami – all leave the playing field vastly changed from what it was just moments before. 
  • Some analysts may claim they can foresee a stock market crash, but for most people, it feels like a loose brick on a tall building aiming squarely at our livelihoods. 
  • On the positive side, marriage changes things – hopefully for the better – as does the birth of a new baby, which alters the life of the child’s parents (and grandparents) forever.

Sometimes, paradoxically, we yearn for a black swan event. 

Our political discourse and our tragically flawed leadership (worldwide, not just in Israel) are in desperate need of change. We can’t continue with the current hate-fueled divisiveness. Lately, though, it seems pointless to even dream. 

And yet, the message of Rosh Hashana and black swan theory is that this, too, can change without notice. Fresh starts are always possible.

After all, if the United States can ping-pong between Donald Trump as president in 2016, Joe Biden four years later, and potentially back to Trump in 2024, the same could happen here. The current Israeli coalition could fall; sane and competent ministers could take over after new elections; Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar could release the hostages and decamp to Tunisia; the Iranian people could rise up and overthrow the ayatollahs.

“This war will almost certainly [produce] a new generation of leaders inside of Israel,” notes British journalist Douglas Murray, author of the best-selling book The War on the West. “This past year has produced remarkable people who stepped up to the moment. My hope is that a new generation of Palestinian leaders will come along at some point, too.”

The average Israeli has little sway over any of these black swan events. Instead, we take comfort from the concluding lines of Rosh Hashana’s Un’taneh Tokef prayer:

  • Who will live in quietude and who will be tormented?
  • Who will enjoy tranquility and who will be distressed?
  • Who will be impoverished and who will be enriched?
  • Who will be degraded and who will be exalted?

That’s my hope for the coming year – that we will live in quietude and tranquility, that we will no longer be degraded and impoverished by our leaders and enemies alike but will be enriched and exalted, and that a new reality will upend the region, whitewashing away the destructive black swans in our midst.

I first shared my Rosh Hashana prayer at The Jerusalem Post.

Black swan image: Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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When Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party nominee for U.S. president, I was initially apprehensive. While I remain repulsed by Republican contender Donald Trump’s lack of empathy, unbridled narcissism and many of his past and proposed policies, Harris has a checkered record on my biggest culture war bugaboo, namely how beholden or not she is (or will be) to the progressive, anti-Israel left wing of her party.

Donald Trump

Harris’s performance in last week’s U.S. Presidential debate put my worries to rest (mostly). And compared to Trump, who rambled, demeaned and lied, Harris was sharp, focused and, ultimately, presidential.

Kamala Harris

I still have some not insignificant reservations, and I truly wish these weren’t the only two candidates running, but Harris will be getting my vote. 

That’s not where I started.

When Harris was first “anointed” as the then-presumptive nominee, I was ready to write a column on why I couldn’t vote for either Trump or Harris. For the first time in my voting life, I planned to say, I was going to sit this election out. 

After all, during the 2019 primaries, Harris was dubbed by The Hill, “the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.” That’s far from where I’m holding these days. Harris has since tried to walk back her woke bonafides, such as her former support for “defunding the police,” though I don’t entirely trust her to not return to those progressive roots once elected. 

Trump, on the other hand, while a nightmare for his domestic policies, was actually pretty good when it came to foreign policy, whether by design or accident. From a purely Israeli perspective, I briefly considered holding my nose, checking my moral compass at the door, and voting for the man in November. 

Still, while Harris’s statements on Israel’s seven-front war have not been as supportive as I’d prefer, she has at least tried to check the right boxes. Her husband, first gentleman Doug Emhoff’s reaction to the execution of the six hostages, including Israeli-American Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was as authentic as it was gutting. He seems like a mensch. Too bad he can’t be the vice-presidential candidate instead of Tim Walz, a likable guy who nevertheless opined about the post-October 7 antisemitic protesters that they “are speaking out for all the right reasons.” 

During last week’s debate, Harris did exactly as she promised when she boasted about being a prosecutor (she was formerly California’s attorney-general) taking on a convicted felon: She relentlessly goaded Trump who fell for the bait and promptly lost the plot. 

After Harris demeaned Trump’s rallies by saying that “people leave early out of exhaustion and boredom,” an agitated Trump began ranting about a debunked conspiracy theory that, in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants “are eating the pets of the people who live there… They’re eating the dogs…they’re eating the cats.” 

Trump continued his parade of derangement by arguing that Walz wants to execute babies who are already born and that Harris supports paying for “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison” (that one is actually true). At least Trump didn’t recycle his comments from an event organized by the conservative Turning Point Action where he proclaimed, “Christians… you won’t have to vote anymore…four more years [and] it will be fixed.” 

When it comes to Israel, Harris repeated the assertion that she has over her “entire career and life supported Israel” and that “I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself.” (I was less comfortable with her next sentence where she repeated the mantra of a two-state solution, something most Israelis and Palestinians don’t believe is possible for the foreseeable future.)

But Trump’s retort that Harris “hates Israel” and that “if she’s president…Israel will not exist within two years” was more fear-mongering than fact, as was his supposition that when you “look at what’s going on in the Middle East…this would have never happened” under a Trump presidency.

While that’s clearly electioneering hyperbole, it emphasizes my biggest worry about a second Trump presidency: his unpredictability. You never know what’s going to come out of his mouth next. 

While right now, Trump backers argue their candidate is more pro-Israel than Harris, imagine, for example, if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were caught on a hot mic referring to Trump’s appearance in, say, a disparaging way, how quickly Trump would turn on the premier. He did, after all, essentially boycott Netanyahu after the latter dared to call Biden to congratulate him on his 2019 win.

The Republican Party’s isolationist tendencies could spell more trouble for Israel going forward than any past benefits, such as moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or spearheading the Abraham Accords. Trump may have claimed in 2017 to be “the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen,” but hosting white supremacists and Holocaust deniers like Nick Fuentes and Kanye West doesn’t bode well for the Jews.

Harris’s positions on healthcare, abortion and taxation align with my political leanings on U.S. domestic challenges. I still worry that she may entertain enacting a ban on arms sales to Israel, a policy that groups like the pro-Hamas “Uncommitted” are advocating for. Her admonition – that bombs and missiles should be limited to “defensive” purposes – could be “weaponized,” so to speak, by our enemies. Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Zvika Klein rightly worried in a recent column that Harris could become increasingly “susceptible to the influence of progressive leaders who have been critical of Israel.”

But between a candidate who on the debate stage exuded confidence and clarity and one who presents, as the Post’s David Brinn writes, as “an unhinged loose cannon whose moods and utterances flit with the wind,” I’ll take my cue from Taylor Swift, who endorsed Harris following the debate, and whose lyrics from her most memorable song could be applied to Trump’s attempt to retake the presidency:

“We are never, ever getting back together.”

I first reluctantly endorsed Harris at The Jerusalem Post.

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I’m writing this column from Lisbon, Portugal, where my wife, Jody, and I are on vacation, having a wonderful time while, at the same time, feeling deeply guilty.

This won’t be the first time we’ve traveled outside of Israel since October 7. Earlier this year, we visited our aging parents in California to introduce them to their great-grandchildren. That was a need as much as a want – who knows if or when there will be another opportunity? 

A month after that trip, we followed our jazz saxophone-playing son, Aviv, to Switzerland, where he was headlining five nights at “Marian’s Jazzroom” in Bern. That was more a want than a need, but we still had an “excuse” for leaving Israel in the midst of a war.

But Portugal – there was no imperative to follow the music or to ensure my 92-year-old mother got to meet her offspring’s offspring’s offspring in person. 

No, this was a vacation of escape, a desire to breathe again, if only for a moment, which of course added to the feelings that we were doing something unpatriotic at a time when a Hezbollah attack had just been thwarted, Iran was still threatening retaliation, and when our hostages, those who are still alive, were still being held captive in horrific conditions.

We’re not alone in this mélange of emotions.

For most of the past 11 months, Israelis have danced along an unbidden, increasingly narrow tightrope. On the one hand, there’s the daily death toll which casts its gloom on everything, while on the other hand, we’ve been living a relatively “normal life,” taking care of our grandchildren, going out for dinners with friends, even dancing at a wedding or two.

When I read the news, I sink into despair. Then we go to a rock and roll concert. But even then, it’s impossible to deny reality.

We’ve been going to the annual Hutzot HaYotzer arts and crafts festival in Jerusalem for some 30 years. Every night of the festival a different Israeli rock band takes to the main stage in front of an ecstatic audience of thousands. This year, we caught a double concert of 80s stars Tislam and Yehuda Poliker.

The musicians referred to the hostages several times in their between-song patter. But the segment that moved Jody and me to tears was a Poliker song with a video backdrop of the ubiquitous hostage posters that can be found on nearly every street corner in Israel, each image appearing one by one.

It’s hard to let go freely when the faces smiling back at you are those who were brutally captured, raped and murdered, including while we were away our friends’ son Hersh Goldberg-Polin. And yet, like Noa Argamani after her rescue, dance we did. 

The dichotomy of life in the Middle East never ceases to amaze.

And now here we are in Portugal for 10 days. I’m trying give myself a break. Still, I find myself ping-ponging, one moment wanting to stay on top of every nugget of news, the next fantasizing about disassociating from anything Jewish or Israeli, of moving to Lisbon permanently and never mentioning Israel or Judaism again.

But then there’s the grandkids, the community we’ve amassed, the wonderful and fulfilling life we’ve built.

Perhaps that’s the nature of being a Jew in a world where antisemitism is resurgent, where Jews are canceled at literary events and booted out of professional associations: to live in that tension between joy and despair, to keep plugging away, knowing tomorrow could be worse, while at the same time never losing hope that the dayafter tomorrow will be, must be better.

We’ve lived through tough times in the past. On the day we made aliyah in 1994, IDF Corporal Nachshon Wachsman was being held captive by Hamas in an apartment north of Jerusalem. He was eventually murdered.

Two years later, suicide bombers became ever-present and we were terrified to ride on public transportation, eat out in cafes or even walk down the street without obsessively looking over our shoulders. 

We survived those and we’ll survive this time, too. 

Still, it’s profoundly disorienting to have been thrust back into history so violently. In that respect, our current situation is in keeping with the Jewish past, where yidden celebrated at smachot (joyous ceremonies like weddings), made love and raised children, all the while never knowing when or where the next pogrom was coming. 

A friend just got back from a month in Paris with his family. Were you able to enjoy yourself? I asked. “Yes,” he replied hesitantly, “but the heaviness was never far away.”

Shalom Hartman senior fellow Yossi Klein Halevi described his concerns in a recent episode of the “For Heaven’s Sake” podcast. 

“What happens when you’ve already gone through 2,000 years of Jewish history, you finally come home … and the war against Jewish legitimacy and Jewish existence doesn’t end,” as the early Zionists prayed it would.

Klein Halevi then offers a moving conclusion.

“I came here because this story matters to me more than any other story. Because this story is an extension of my own personal story. So, what happens to this story isn’t separable from what happens to me. I have to be here. I don’t have a choice. I don’t have anywhere to go. If, God forbid, this story fails, then my life has failed.”

And yet, Klein Halevi adds that he feels “this incredible privilege to be part of this. I’m in it, no matter what.”

That’s how I feel, too, even as Jody and I sit in a Lisbon café eating Pastel de Nata, a Portuguese custard tart, while pining for the delectable sandwiches from our favorite restaurant, Bruno, in Jerusalem. We’ll be back soon enough. To what, I don’t think anyone knows. But it’s still home and for that I’m grateful.

This story was first published by The Jerusalem Post.

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Covid is back. It seems like everyone I know has been exposed or infected this summer. That includes me.

Roni with her Covid positive test

My latest bout with Covid-19 stemmed from the same source as last time: not an unmasked ride on public transportation or a crowded party, but my kids. 

Our daughter, Merav, was at our house with our seven-month-old granddaughter, Roni, when Merav started to spike a fever. She hoped it was just dehydration – it had been unbearably hot for weeks – but just to be safe, she took one of our home Covid tests.

It was positive.

A few hours later, so was Roni.

Merav was bummed but not panicked. These days, she said with an air of confident nonchalance, Covid is just like a bad flu or cold. There are no rules anymore on quarantine or distancing. Most people don’t even bother to test at home. Israel has shut down the once-ubiquitous PCR drive-through stations.

The story is very different for people with PTCD – Post-Traumatic Covid Disorder. That’s not a real diagnosis in the DSM-5, but a strong correlation between PTSD and Covid has been documented, although it mainly refers to people who either were hospitalized or are suffering from long Covid (of which an estimated 17.6 million Americans are now living with, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

“Studies show that the experience of being hospitalized [with Covid-19] — being confused and frightened and feeling like you’re drowning — is traumatizing,” explains Cedars-Sinai psychiatrist Dr. Itai Danovitch. Up to a third of such patients develop PTSD. 

To put that in perspective, while over 90% of people experience a major traumatic event at some point during their lifetime, Danovitch notes, most of us walk away unscathed. Others, however, carry emotional scars for decades.

It’s not just for serious cases. 

When I contracted Covid for the first time two years ago, it was relatively mild. But I am still triggered by even the slightest possible exposure. 

That’s not surprising: When Covid first burst onto the scene, no one knew much about the disease, other than it was felling tens of thousands a week worldwide, eventually infecting 700 million people and killing seven million. 

In those early days, there were no vaccines and few effective treatments. OG Corona was also more virulent than today’s super-contagious but relatively benign Omicron subvariants. The rolling lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 further exacerbated the collective freak-out.

And then there’s the cancer factor: The patients who have the most life-threatening Covid outcomes remain the elderly and the immunocompromised. While I don’t yet fit the first category, I am very much in the second due to chemo and other treatments I’ve had over the years. Put it all together and, voila, it’s PTCD for me.

“I’m not sure if I’d use the word ‘trauma,’” a friend shared with me. However, after someone she was close with who was undergoing cancer treatment caught Covid and died, “I’m definitely taking it more seriously than before.” 

Another friend has essentially been bedridden with long Covid, suffering from kidney and heart problems. “Covid is not a cold. It’s not a flu. It’s a vascular/neurological illness similar to HIV. It’s insane to me that anyone would be nonchalant about getting or spreading Covid.”

An old college buddy concurred. “It affects every organ in your body in a way that makes you susceptible to more serious things like diabetes. The more you get Covid, the greater the risks for your body.”

“We still don’t know all of the things that Covid does, how it does it, and why,” notes Lara Jirmanus, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. Not taking Covid seriously represents a kind of “hubris that almost assumes we can see the future.”

I was fortunate that, this time around, my Covid was mostly mild again. I barely had a cough and no fever. My nose was stuffy and I had a nasty headache.

Which led to the next challenge for my PTCD: getting out of Covid.

After a dozen or so days, I was starting to feel better – not perfect, but improved. So, I took a second home Covid test.

Still positive.

Jody and I were invited to the wedding of the son of some of our closest friends the next night. I certainly didn’t want to be responsible for a super spreader event.

The mother of the groom happens to be a doctor. So I asked her.

“I doubt you’re contagious after all this time,” she said, adding that the event will be outside, which should mitigate some of my concerns. “Please come. We couldn’t have a wedding without you guys there!”

Merav and Roni are fine now. Merav’s husband, Gabe, and our two-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Ilai, never got sick – or if they did, they were among the estimated one out of three people who catch Covid and are asymptomatic. 

Another possibility: The journal Nature reported in June 2024 that some people may never catch Covid due to high levels of activity in a gene called HLA-DQA2.

As for me, at the three-week mark, I was still testing positive. My doctor told me to start with the antiviral Paxlovid, which had helped me last time. Even though Paxlovid is not supposed to be used after the first five days of symptoms, my hematologist said there’s anecdotal evidence it can work even when administered later. 

“You can handle this,” Jody reassured me, repeating the mantra I’ve been working on lately.

The Paxlovid worked thankfully; another five days and I was finally feeling fine. The entire experience was more annoyance than aggravation. It was, looking at it objectively and in hindsight, far from traumatic.

No, I’m not about to throw caution entirely to the wind. But at the same time, I’m trying my hardest to not let PTCD lock me down again. 

I first wrote about PTCD for The Jerusalem Post.

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Is R48 the best hotel in the world?

by Brian on August 26, 2024

in Reviews,Travel

The glass elevator at the R48

When I asked a colleague for a recommendation for a hotel where my wife and I could celebrate our 36th(“double chai”) wedding anniversary, my colleague didn’t hesitate. “The R48,” he replied. “It’s probably the best hotel I’ve ever stayed at – not just in Israel but anywhere in the world!”

After a recent stay, I would have to concur. 

The R48 Hotel and Gardens, located at 48 Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv (hence the name) is an 11-room boutique hotel with a meticulously designed interior ensconced inside a classic Bauhaus-style building that had been for many years an abandoned eyesore used by drug dealers and the homeless.

Exterior of R48 in classic Bauhaus style

No more. 

In 2012, Canadian Jewish billionaire couple Heather Reisman (founder and CEO of Indigo Books and Music) and Gerald Schwartz (chairman of private equity firm Onex) bought the building, which is one of 4,000 or so boxy Bauhaus structures across the city that have earned Tel Aviv UNESCO world heritage status along with the nickname “the White City.”

Reisman and Schwartz already owned the building next door, housing the HESEG Foundation, which provides free university tuition to Lone Soldiers in Israel. But they’d never run a hotel before, so the Canadians partnered with Ruti and Mati Broudo, owners of the R2M Group, a key player in Tel Aviv’s tourist and culinary scene. 

R2M operates restaurants, bars, live music venues and other properties including the Montefiore boutique hotel, the Norman and the Poli House.

The R48, which took ten years to refurbish and opened in 2022, is the crème de la crème of the growing R2M hospitality empire “The idea was to feel like you were going to your best friend’s house,” Reisman told Azure Magazine in 2023 – that is, if your best friend’s house sports rooms that start at around $2,000 a night.

The R48 experience starts before you even arrive. “Send us a WhatsApp 10 minutes before you get here and we’ll wait for you on the street,” Arielle, the cheery front desk manager who made aliyah 15 years ago from North America, wrote to us. And indeed, Arielle and valet/bellman Max were there to take our car and luggage – a nice touch given there’s no parking on Rothschild.

Arielle didn’t just check us in and point our way to the elevator; she walked us to our suite and explained all the high-tech devices we’d need to operate.

That included iPad screens throughout to control the lights, air conditioning and blackout shutters; instructions on how to “cast” one’s laptop or iPhone to one of the two flat-screen TVs; and how to operate the piece de la resistance – the suite’s Japanese toilet. Open the bathroom door and the toilet lid automatically rises as the unit gives itself a quick rinse. The seat is heated; when you’re done, there are three settings of spray, pulse and air dry.

To top it off, there’s also a second bathroom – if you’ve ever had to fight with your spouse over who gets to use the toilet in a normal hotel room, this is truly the height of luxury.

The minibar was more a maxibar – three drawers stuffed with drinks and snacks. Two of the most delicious blueberry muffins were waiting for us on the dining room table in addition to a bottle of wine, a tray of finger sandwiches, olives and some tasty slightly pickled cucumbers.

We stayed in the Garden Suite, a mid-level room for the R48. But there was nothing “mid” about this room, which at 80 square meters, was larger than our first apartment in Israel. At NIS 6,400 a night – equivalent to a month’s rent – it’s more than the Bauhaus Suite (at “just” NIS 3,500) but less than the penthouse (starting at NIS 10,500).

Living room area

The furniture in the suite – and throughout the hotel – is from the French Studio Christian Liaigre and featurestulipwood, assamela and walnut. The tranquil garden outside the front lobby was helmed by Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf, who also planned New York’s High Line elevated linear park.

When we visited, it was in the midst of the nerve-wracking “waiting period” before Hezbollah’s and Iran’s declared retaliation following Israel’s targeted assassinations in Beirut and Tehran. We debated for days whether it was prudent to take a vacation in Tel Aviv, the presumed epicenter for any attack. Our compromise: to stay close to the hotel and its bomb shelter. Rather than explore the city, we lounged around the foliage-rimmed rooftop pool – both the day we arrived and afterward.

Rooftop pool

For breakfast, don’t expect a classic Israeli buffet with endless fish, cheese and eggs. Instead, the buffet is served to your table. There were more of those delectable muffins, various kinds of bread and rolls, and omelets with a mound of smoked salmon on the side. Even without the all-you-can-eat ambiance, we still walked away stuffed.

Breakfast area

It’s not that often that an elevator is a tourist attraction, but the R48’s is something special. When the team at AN+ Architects was working on the design, one of the original stairwells was beyond repair. In its place is a 360-degree glass lift that’s essentially an entire room complete with a couch to sit on and an enormous book of Annie Liebowitz photographs. The hotel is peppered with local Israeli art from well-known artists including Ori Gersht, Tal Shochat and Anis Ashkar.

If I had to come up with any complaints, there was but one; the windows weren’t particularly soundproof in our suite, so the sounds of the city crept in (and every garbage truck sounded to me like an air raid siren). 

So, is the R48 “the best hotel in the world?” It’s certainly at the top of my list. For your next visit to Tel Aviv, it should be on yours, too.

My review of the R48 appeared in The Jerusalem Post.

Photo credits: Brian Blum and the R48 Hotel and Gardens.

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Anniversary: A love story

August 11, 2024

Every year in mid-August, my wife, Jody, and I celebrate our wedding anniversary. This year, I wanted to mark the occasion by recounting our story.

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How to fight antisemitism

July 28, 2024

The resurgence of antisemitism in the 21st century has been unnerving and dangerous, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise, writes Bari Weiss.

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The Einstein Effect

July 14, 2024

With 20 million followers, Albert Einstein is the most popular dead celebrity on Facebook. A new book tells how Einstein got so popular.

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“Dissident dialogues” pits pro- and anti-Israel pundits against each other

June 30, 2024

To understand why the world seems to have erupted in antisemitic rhetoric after October 7, listen to this debate from “Dissident Dialogues.”

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A Saudi “day after” plan for Gaza

June 17, 2024

Israel is losing the war with Hamas in Gaza. But there’s a way out. The answer lies to the east – in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

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