Large tech conferences are ideal for networking with colleagues you may only see once a year.

You know what else likes to network at large conferences? Viruses. 

If February’s OurCrowd Global Summit had been held in the last couple of years (it was canceled in 2021 and 2022 due to Covid restrictions), it would have been dubbed a super-spreader event. With 9,000 attendees crammed into packed hallways and lecture halls in Jerusalem’s International Convention Center, there’s no doubt that at least some of the participants must have been sick – if not with Covid then with the flu or common cold.

I apparently wasn’t the only one concerned about picking up a bug at the Summit.

Israeli-Canadian startup SaNOtize set up a booth to test its antiviral spray, enovid. The company’s cofounder and chief science officer, Chris Miller, told me this was “the world’s first double-blind clinical trial launched at a convention.”

SaNOtize cites studies claiming that by using nitric oxide (NO) and the company’s proprietary NORS (Nitric Oxide Releasing Solution), enovid can kill 99% of virus particles in two minutes. A 2022 study published in The Lancet found that, if you do catch Covid, treatment with enovid cut the duration of disease by 50% compared with a control group. 

In another double-blind controlled study, enovid reduced the viral RNA load in infected Covid patients by more than 95% within 24 hours of treatment. 

Gilly Reeve, CEO, SaNOtize

“We have known that NO is an antiviral for over a decade,” Gilly Regev, SaNOtize’s Israeli CEO, told me. “NO is a naturally occurring molecule with documented antiviral, antibiotic and antifungal properties. We have used it on ourselves while traveling for years.” 

“I haven’t gotten the flu for ten years,” Miller added. “And I’ve never caught Covid.”

Chris Miller, chief science officer

Enovid works by creating both a physical and chemical barrier in the nose. 

First, “the gelling agent creates a mechanical barrier that traps viruses within the nasal cavity and prevents them from further entry into the respiratory tract causing infection,” Regev said. 

A chemical barrier is also established by the NO, as it destroys the shape of the spikes/protrusions of any viruses present – Covid, the flu, rhinoviruses and RSV – rendering as useless the part of the virus that’s evolved to penetrate the body’s cells and replicate.

The SaNOtize clinical trial at the OurCrowd Summit enrolled around 450 people. Half the participants received the real thing and half a “sham” – a neutral saline solution. Daily reminders to spray and test (five home antigen kits were included in the trial kit) were sent by email and SMS. Participants who completed the full 10-day process and filled in all the forms received a $100 Amazon gift certificate.

“What happens if you get the sham and you wind up getting Covid or the flu?” I asked Miller.

“We stop the trial and immediately send you the real spray,” Miller replied. 

What if you were in close proximity to a known Covid or flu carrier?

“You have a three- to four-hour window when exposed to the virus before it penetrates the host cell and starts replicating and shredding into the nasal passages,” Miller told me.

You can buy enovid in Israel, Europe and parts of Southeast Asia, but not in North America yet where NO is only approved as a prescription drug to help with “blue baby syndrome” (persistent pulmonary hypertension in newborns). Phase III trials are starting now. In Israel, enovid is sold over-the-counter for NIS 139.

When NO was first being tested in the early 1990s, it was delivered through pressurized gas cylinders. Part of SaNOtize’s innovation is to deliver NO as a spray to use at home, rather than requiring expensive tanks. 

SaNOtize has 20 employees and has raised over $40 million. Miller, a respiratory therapist, completed a PhD in 2004 on the antimicrobial properties of NO. Regev has a doctorate in biochemistry from the Hebrew University.

“Can’t you still get sick by breathing in a virus through the mouth?” I inquired. While that certainly can happen, “the major route of entry, and specifically the incubation location, for respiratory viruses is in the nasal cavity,” Miller explained. 

Now that Covid is becoming less of a concern, will this harm SaNOtize’s sales of enovid? 

“Sanotize was never a Covid-specific company,” Miller said. While, during the pandemic, the company accelerated its application of enovid for viral contagions, the original research was to treat sinusitis, warts, nail fungus and diabetic foot ulcers. “We are already pivoting back,” Miller said.

SaNOtize has an organizational model that’s the opposite of most Israeli startups: R&D is in Canada while manufacturing is in Israel. Why the flip? I asked Miller. “Israel was simply faster. It would have taken us 18 months to ramp up production in North America.”

You’re probably wondering at this point what were the results of my SaNOtize clinical trial? While I don’t know if I got the real spray or the sham, I also didn’t catch Covid or the flu. 

Was that just good luck or does enovid really work? The science is promising; ask me again in ten years if, like Miller, I remain flu and Covid-free.

In the meantime, with an overseas trip scheduled in just a week’s time, I bought a bottle of enovid at my local SuperPharm “just in case” and plan to prophylactically do the recommended three to four sprays a day (twice in each nostril) while on the road. 

“It’s another tool in our pandemic preparedness toolbox,” Regev told me.

In that respect, I hope that enovid can live up to its catchy tag line: “Hand sanitizer but for the nose.”

I first wrote about my experience using enovid for The Jerusalem Post.

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I look forward every year to when Stav Erez and Eli Nir, partners at OurCrowd, take to the stage in Jerusalem at the venture capital crowdfunding platform’s Global Investor Summit to present their predictions for the top tech trends of the next 12 months.

Main auditorium with President Isaac Herzog speaking

So, what can we expect to come our way in 2023?

1. Fusion gets 150 million degrees hot. The announcement by the National Ignition Facility at California’sLawrence Livermore National Laboratory that it had achieved a breakthrough in producing nuclear fusion ignited a power generation frenzy that has reached Israel. The Israel Energy Ministry recently pledged $11.5 million to establish a national nuclear fusion institute. The funding will include NT-Tao, a local startup developing a compact system for nuclear fusion. With fusion, there are no radioactive elements left over as with fission power plants.

2. Space is becoming crowded. That’s both a nod to the fact that space junk is increasingly clogging up the pathways from the Earth, as well as the strong interest by investors in space-tech. Israeli startups of note include Helios, which is creating a system to mine minerals on the moon; SpacePharma, which is developing drugs in zero gravity; and cSpace, which is mounting telescopes on nanosatellites.

3. Innovation puts equity into healthcare. Israel’s prowess in medical devices and technology is well known, as are the benefits of our national HMO system which enables researchers to access robust, anonymized databases. All of this promises an equitable future where anyone can access top quality healthcare anywhere at any time. Among the Israeli startups in the space are Feelbetter, which can identify patients at risk for a range of diseases, and Tunefork, which employs smartphones to conduct home hearing tests.

4. The carbon rush is on. Erez and Nir were referring here to the rush to decarbonize the atmosphere to forestall the worst effects of climate change. Among the Israeli startups leading this space are BlueGreen Water Technologies, which says it has used its water-based carbon removal tech to remove some 3.3 million tons of carbon from the air, H2Pro, which uses a new form of electrolysis to create non-polluting “green hydrogen”; and Luminscent, which has developed a method to capture “waste heat” from large industrial plants.

5. Food tech parity is on its way. Plant-based alternatives to meat are already becoming mainstream; lab-grown cultured meat is on its way, too. But to really take off, they must taste good. Fortunately, some of the food-tech innovations on display at the OurCrowd Summit were truly scrumptious. SavorEat was giving tastes of its 3D-printed plant-based burgers, while DouxMatok’s Incredo Sugar is real sugar but with 30% to 50% less sweetener. I had a muffin with Incredo-made “Nutella” – it was even better than the “regular” peanut butter chocolate squares at a nearby table. 

6. The next frontier in energy is storage. It’s one thing to find new ways to produce energy. But how do you store it, especially if it’s from a renewable source like the sun that winks out every night at dusk? The usual answer: batteries. Indeed, Ford says that its new electric F-150 Lightning’s batteries can power a house for up to three days. Israeli startup Addionics is developing batteries for electric cars it says can store twice the energy as is traditional. Beyond batteries, Quidnet aims to stash excess energy in pressurized water buried in between layers of rock in the ground. 

7. The era of specialized silicon has arrived. One of the bottlenecks that the Covid-19 pandemic unmasked was serious problems with the global supply chain. With ship crews, truck drivers and dock workers stuck in quarantine, the normally steady supply of semiconductors slowed, resulting in long delays for everything from new cars to computers. That’s opened an opportunity for what Erez and Nir dubbed “bespoke silicon.” An example: Israeli firm Hailo is developing its own AI processing chip to work with “edge devices” – hardware like a router or switch that controls data flow at the boundary between two networks.

8. Generative AI – a virtual breakthrough. ChatGPT, the new conversational AI tool that’s now being bundled into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, along with Google’s upcoming alternative, Bard, have captured the world’s imagination in just a few short months. While there are pitfalls to the technology – Bing repeatedly told New York Times tech analyst Kevin Roose to leave his wife – the future will clearly be even more computer-mediated than it is today. The tech is not usually so confrontational. Israeli startup D-ID, for example, enables customers to create custom videos with talking avatars “with the touch of a button.” 

9. The metaverse – is it game on or game over? Facebook is so convinced that the metaverse will be the next big thing, it even changed its corporate moniker to “Meta.” It’s not all fun and games, though. Surgical Theater allows physicians to visualize operations better via the metaverse. Its augmented reality application renders text and data over the live image of a patient’s anatomy so a physician wearing a Surgical Theater headset never needs to take his or her eyes off the surgical site. 

10. We need a trillion new trees. Trees are a crucial component to combating climate change. Yet, over the last century, half of all the forests on the planet have either been chopped down or devastated by wildfires. The Earth loses an average of 20 billion trees each year. Nir and Erez pointed to the OurCrowd-backed Flash Forest, which aims to use drones and its unique “seedpod” technology, containing water-retention additives, beneficial bacteria and fungi, minerals and nutrients, to plant a billion trees by 2028. 

I shared Erez and Nir’s predictions first at The Jerusalem Post.

Picture of main crowd and SavorEat burgers: credit Tomer Foltyn

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“You People” is a disturbing film that hews close to the memes of modern-day woke culture. 

The Netflix movie, which began airing in January, has been savaged by reviewers. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com called it “a stunning misfire, an assemblage of talent in search of an actual movie.” Wendy Ide at The Guardian called it “frequently excruciating.”

My own take away after subjecting myself to two hours of cinematic torture: This movie plays like a primer on how to be a self-hating Jew in America today.

“You People” depicts a romance between Jewish 35-year-old Ezra, played by Jonah Hill, and Lauren London’s Amira, the Muslim Black woman he initially mistakes for his Uber driver. Their parents, Shelley (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and David Duchovny as Arnold for the Jews, Eddie Murphy (Akbar) and Nia Long (Fatima) for the African-American side, are caricatures who straddle the line between tone-deaf and hateful.

It’s mostly played for laughs and there were a few decent chuckles in the film. But while Murphy’s Louis Farrakhan-worshipping Akbar doesn’t pull any punches in his contention that his daughter should not be going out with a white man (ironically, Lauren London has a Black mother and an Ashkenazi Jewish father), Ezra’sparents are just clueless. It’s not only their awkward attempts at being more woke than their potential machatunim, but about their Jewishness in general.

Which is to say that, other than an opening scene in a synagogue (actually the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles) for Yom Kippur, there are no positive depictments of what it means to be Jewish. Beyond saying,”We’re Jewish,” any actual Jewish content in the form of rituals, holidays or discussions of contemporary Jewish issues are simply missing. Suffice it to say the words “Israel” or “Zionism” are never uttered.

What there is instead is a steady stream of pandering by the Jewish protagonists to position themselves as cool and acceptable to Amira’s family. As Andrew Lapin writes in JTA, “In a modern-day twist, the white liberal family, rather than expressing anxiety over the race of their child’s partner, fetishizes her family instead.” 

The one redeeming scene in “You People” takes place during the initial cringe-worthy meet-cute between thetwo families. When Akbar asks Shelley if she’s “familiar with the work” of Farrakhan, a notorious antisemite, Shelley briefly drops her solicitous smile and quips “Well, I’m familiar with what he said about the Jews.” 

Good for you, Mom, but then Ezra immediately changes the subject – to no avail. The disagreement comes back again in a rip-roaring shriek fest on which community – Black or Jewish – has suffered more oppression. 

“Are you trying to compare the Holocaust with slavery?” Akbar asks menacingly over dinner. 

“Oh, I would never do that,” Shelley recoils, before adding, “Although the Blacks and the Jews have a similar struggle.” 

“Jews were the OG slaves,” Duchovny’s Arnold offers sheepishly, which Murphy’s Akbar dismisses as being 3,500 years too far in the past. 

Arnold doubles down. 

“I don’t have to go back to Egypt. I just go back 75 years. Jews only make up one half of one percent of the world’s population because we were systematically annihilated,” he says. 

That small percentage “seems to be doing pretty good right now,” Akbar shoots back, employing a classic antisemitic trope that jettisons any trauma Jews have suffered for a transactional approach that defines us as no different than the white majority.

“Our people came here with nothing, like everybody else,” Shelley responds, to which Fatima, Amira’s mother, lets loose the conspiracy screed that the Jews came to America “with the money [they] made from the slave trade.”

That inflammatory indictment is never addressed further due to some slapstick hijinks involving a flaming kufi (cap) Akbar received from Farrakhan himself. The denigration is dropped like a hot knish, mustard-side down. 

And then the film reverts to its main message: Jewish apologetics and attempts to prove who’s the most woke. No one defends the Jews again over the next hour and a half. At one point near the film’s end, Shelley asks for forgiveness from Amira and her family “on behalf of all Jewish people.”

“Louis Farrakhan is actually the hero of this movie,” writes Allison Josephs on the Jew in the City website.

As this is a rom-com, we all know that the couple will hit rocky times before the inevitable happy ending. 

I didn’t buy it. 

After so much vitriol has been spilled on screen, and so much ignorance is left unrefuted, the idea of any of these unself-critical leopards changing their spots is as ludicrous as the making of this movie was. 

The film never acknowledges the partnership between Jewish and Black activists marching for civil rights together in the 1960s. Rather, in its ill-conceived attempt at showing how two very different communities could conceivably come together, it achieves the opposite. 

In that sense, “You People” is the ultimate anti-assimilation comedy. Perhaps representatives of the Jewish Agency should show this as an aliyah inducement?

The Jewish Internet has also been up in arms.

“There’s much Jewish apologizing for racism. None for antisemitism,” tweeted David Baddiel, author of “Jews Don’t Count.”

“It’s shameful when the groveling, oblivious, over-woke Jew is the best we can do,” added Israeli media consultant Linda Lovitch.

I’m not saying that all films must have an uplifting moral about loving the other unconditionally – strife and conflict are the propellant for much art – but I disagree with producer Kevin Misher’s assessment that “detailed discussions of antisemitism would have distracted” from the film being a character-driven comedy.

There were certainly characters in “You People.” Comedy, I’m not so sure about.

I first “reviewed” You People in The Jerusalem Post.

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Will technology make halacha irrelevant? That was the question Moshe Koppel, emeritus professor of math and computer science at Bar-Ilan University and author of Judaism Straight Up, posed during a recent lecture in Jerusalem to mark 10 years since my friend Jeremy Barkan passed away. 

Prof. Moshe Koppel

“Every generation thinks that they’re at an inflection point,” Koppel began his talk. And while there are very few actual such turning events in history, “I believe we are now at an inflection point, one that has implications for halacha.”

The trigger is “value malleability, where the values that have long been held by societies are changing,” Koppel said, citing religion in decline, lower birth rates and gender fluidity.

This is fueled further by technology, which is also at an inflection point. Koppel outlined four areas where technology could change the way Jews observe the law. 

1. Self-driving cars. No observant Jew is going to knowingly speed off in a car on Shabbat. But what if the car doesn’t have a driver but just arrives at a pre-determined time? The door opens automatically, and the vehicle departs with no action on the passenger’s part. 

Let’s take it one step further, Koppel suggested. What if some futuristic wearable device could read your mind wirelessly, “so all you need to do is think and stuff is going to happen?” If you conjure in your mind the thought, “I need a car at 2 pm on Saturday afternoon,” but you don’t open any app or tap any buttons, are you still breaking halacha?

2. Lab-grown meat. Cultured chicken and beef are better for the planet – no need to dedicate acres of land for farms, no more cow farts contributing to climate change – and better for our bodies (no antibiotics required). 

Some top Israeli rabbinic authorities, including David Stav, Oren Duvdavani, Moshe Bigel and Yuval Cherlow, have even deemed meat grown in a lab to be “parve,” since no living animal need be shechted (slaughtered according to Jewish ritual) and the cultivation process uses embryonic stem cells rather than muscle tissue. (Embryos are considered a separate entity from the mother, according to halacha.)

Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau agrees. Last week he issued a ruling that Israeli startup Aleph Farms’ cultured steaks are indeed parve – although they must be marketed as a “meat alternative” to not cause kosher consumers to inadvertently sin by mixing meat and milk.

Still, “if there’s only synthetic meat in the world, then most of kashrut doesn’t matter anymore,” Koppel suggested. You can eat a cheeseburger or some Häagen-Dazs after cholent and you’ll still be within kosher guidelines.

3. Education. The university world has typically “been hostile to haredi (ultra-Orthodox) values,” Koppel said. But now it’s possible to “just go online and watch a recording of the best courses at MIT. You don’t need to be part of university culture. So, the ultra-Orthodox will soon be able to get a university education without paying a price.” 

By price, Koppel is referring to the attacks those in the haredi world might receive if caught studying outside the walls of the yeshiva.

Nor are the benefits of online learning limited to the Orthodox. We have friends whose three children all received degrees from Harvard almost entirely by attending courses on the Internet. 

At some point in the future, we may not even need to attend online classes. Like the “mind-reading” device for self-driving cars but in reverse, a computer-human interface could pump knowledge directly into the brain. 

4. Artificial intelligence. In a phone interview after the talk, I asked Koppel about ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that’s taken the Internet by storm. ChatGPT is nearly good enough already to answer the kinds of basic questions about halacha that used to be the exclusive domain of one’s rabbi, Koppel explained.

“There will always be the hard questions requiring someone with human insights and sensitivity,” Koppel added. “But 99% of questions are basically ‘look up’ queries, which someone who knows their way around Jewish texts could answer.” Those are perfect for AI tools like ChatGPT.

Is there a point when things become too easy?

We already see that happening with other aspects of technology. Do you remember your friends’ phone numbers anymore? Or do you simply scroll for their name and tap your phone? 

Ditto for navigation. 

Uri Levine, founder of Waze, writes in his new book, Fall in Love with the Problem Not the Solution, about a time he asked his son to drive him to the airport.

“I can’t, Dad,” he told Levine. “My phone is broken. How will I get there without GPS?”

“I’ll be in the car with you,” Levine responded. “I know the way.”

“But Dad,” the son retorted, “how will I get back home?”

The bottom line is this: If you take away – or at least fundamentally alter – Shabbat, kashrut, education and rabbinic authority, what allure – if any – will a future Orthodoxy “that’s become too thin,” in Koppel’s words, have in the brave new technological world? 

The rabbis will, of course, push back. 

“There are two issues they need to address,” Koppel told me. “The strictly technical – like whether lab-grown meat is kosher and parve – and questions of public policy,” how their congregants should behave. “It’s possible some rabbis will conclude they need to remain strict against certain things,” even where there is a reasonable argument to permit them.

Koppel believes, however, that “the rabbis will need to stretch a little on the technical side in order to get to where they want on the public policy questions.”

How that stretching will evolve in the years to come will be among the most fascinating deliberations in the coming clash between halacha and technology.

The video for Koppel’s talk at Jeremy’s memorial is here.

I first explored how technology and halacha intersect for The Jerusalem Post.

Moshe Koppel headshot is byrebecca2

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Flee or fight?

by Brian on January 15, 2023

in In the News,Politics

Flee or fight? It’s a question I’m hearing a fair amount these days following the formation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition of fearmongers.

The debate is whether we’ve reached – or soon will reach – a tipping point where the Israel we know and love is no longer recognizable, and what the best response should be. Can we still fight the disenfranchisement that spews from the mouth of our newly elected representatives, or should we throw in the towel and start over somewhere else?

Spoiler alert: I’m staunchly in the fight vs. flight camp. But I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t admit that I sometimes wonder what it would take to make me leave this place.

My wife, Jody, and I both agreed that if at some point the non-Orthodox Jewish communities of which we are proud members – Kehilat Tzion and Nava Tehila in Jerusalem – were banned, we might not be able to see our future here.

Other issues are repugnant to us, too – unilateral West Bank annexation, doctors and merchants receiving legal sanction to refuse services to people whose lifestyles go against their religious beliefs – but where we pray is a particularly personal trigger.

Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and its Enemies writes about “the tolerance paradox” where “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.” That is, “if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

The flipside: that same intolerance may very well result in enough infighting and mistrust within the coalition that it won’t see out a full term. As Yossi Klein Halevi notes in The Times of Israel, “Sooner or later this coalition will unravel. The nature of hatred and greed is to turn against itself.”

Let’s say that the government does implode on its own and, this time, when the opposition returns, propelled by a public so disgusted by the desire to return Israeli Judaism “to the ghetto,” as The Jerusalem Post’s Amotz Asa-El described it, it wins a comfortable majority. Is it time to rethink our political system? 

Yes, we’ve tried that before – who can forget the change to direct election of the prime minister in the 1990s? That ultimately backfired and the law was subsequently reversed. 

But times are different now. The system is so clearly broken, we may have no choice but to fix it. 

Cantonization may be the answer – not between Israel and the Palestinians, but within Israel itself, where disparate and bickering geographic regions would be granted the ability to govern themselves as they wish, while a national government would still provide security and other services.

Haaretz writer Carlo Strenger described the canton plan in 2014. 

“Like in Switzerland, Germany and the U.S. [where individual states often have very different policies towards their citizens], the central government’s responsibility and authority should be cut back to the domains that can only be dealt with nationally, like the military, nationwide transportation and ecological management. The rest should be delegated to smaller units.”

This kind of approach “could create a more livable status quo,” he added in an article he penned for the Swiss website, Journal21.ch. “Only cantonization will prevent Israel from devouring itself from within.”

So, if the fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox (haredim) and National Religious of Jerusalem want to run the country’s capital according to Jewish Law, let them do so with their own locally-elected officials. Let them collect taxes and pick up the garbage and tear down illegal construction in their own communities.

The same goes for Tel Aviv or the North or the South of the country. Public transportation on Shabbat would finally become a reality. There would be no more fights over closing restaurants and shops on the day of rest. Reform rabbis could marry whomever they wanted in the canton of Greater Gush Dan. 

I would even be willing to leave Jerusalem and move to the center of the country to actualize such a plan.

If this sounds like the plot of a dystopian TV series, you wouldn’t be wrong. The Israeli show Autonomies posited an even more extreme version of this scenario, where a purely halachic state of Judea with Jerusalem as its capital is separated completely from the rest of the country, not just as a connected canton. 

Naturally, things don’t go as expected (it’s a TV drama, after all). But the very real demographic trends upon which that program based its predictions seem unstoppable. By 2050, haredim will account for close to a third of Israel’s Jewish population. (According to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics released earlier this month, 16% of the total population of Israel is on track to become ultra-Orthodox by the end of this decade.) 

In that case, will there be enough haredi men in the workforce to pay taxes (don’t even get me started about army service), or will Israel become a failed state, as analysts like Dan Ben-David, president of the Shoresh Institute for Socioeconomic Research, regularly forecast?

The last few years of elections have been all about two camps: Right and Left, pro-Bibi or “change.” Shmuel Rosner suggests that’s not the right way of seeing what’s happening in Israel today. There is the “everything-will-be-okay” camp and the “we-are-headed-for-a-cliff” camp, he writes in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. 

I want to believe, perhaps naively, that everything can still be OK. But it won’t happen by burying our heads in the sand. Cantonization is just one idea. 

So, I turn the question over to you, dear readers: What are you going to do to fight and not flee?

I first questioned whether to flee or fight at The Jerusalem Post.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

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Charmed in Sharm

January 7, 2023

In 2005, my family and I spent a week touring Egypt. We hid our Israeli identity. We recently spent 5 days in the Sinai. What a difference.

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Modern-day Maccabees: Will Netanyahu’s gov’t cause an Israeli civil war?

December 28, 2022

Hanukah is a warning for anyone looking at Israel today – a dark story of intra-Jewish fighting over the religious nature of this nascent nation

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Is Covid finally over?

December 18, 2022

Covid is finally over. How do I know? I took my mask off. Not everywhere, but in more places than I have before. Am I making a mistake?

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Hoarding and tossing

December 4, 2022

On the 90th anniversary of The Jerusalem Post, a look back at some of the thousands of clippings I’ve obsessively hoarded – and am now tossing.

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The eternal optimist

November 19, 2022

I was devastated with the results of our fifth election in four years. But there are, in fact, several reasons to be optimistic.

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