The Business of Jacob’s Ladder

May 13, 2010

The Lawn Stage at Jacob’s Ladder When Yehudit Vinegrad took the stage at the close of the Spring 2009 Jacob’s Ladder folk festival and announced that she was stepping down and would, after 33 years, no longer produce the show, a palpable shock and shudder rippled through the crowd. But then Vinegrad added, with a […]

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Memorial for Walter Blum – V’Haya Achrei Chen

May 11, 2010

(יואל ×”, א, ד) This is the third in a series of posts from the memorial for my father, Walter Blum, who passed away last year. The event mixed music and humanistic interpretations of Jewish texts to try to share what my father was like and what he was passionate about. ——————————— When Yoel suggested […]

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Memorial for Walter Blum – Pitchu Li

May 5, 2010

(תהילים קי”×—, ×™”ט) This is the second in a series of posts from the memorial for my father, Walter Blum, who passed away last year. The event mixed music and humanistic interpretations of Jewish texts to try to share what my father was like and what he was passionate about. ——————————— The words for the […]

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Memorial for Walter Blum

April 27, 2010

Walter Blum, 2008 My father, Walter Blum, died a year ago on March 22 of lymphoma. At the time, I wrote on this blog about my difficulties saying the traditional Kaddish prayer and how I planned to formulate a series of alternative “events” to honor my father in a manner that I hope he would […]

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Can a Hookworm Make You Healthy?

April 22, 2010

Can a hookworm make you healthy? Jasper Lawrence seems to think so. And now his special therapeutic worm treatment is available for shipment to Israel. I first heard about Lawrence and his worms when they were featured on an episode of WNYC’s Radio Lab (which was rebroadcast last week on This American Life – one […]

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Tzemah Yoreh’s Atheist Siddur

April 16, 2010

I was quoted in last week’s Jerusalem Post in an article profiling Tzemah Yoreh who has created a new “atheist and feminist siddur” (it’s at ReligiousAtheist.com) My quote referred to how I’ve found inspiration in Yoreh’s work for my own humanistic siddur project – SiddurWiki. If you haven’t visited, I encourage you to take a […]

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What Irked Me About the Simpsons in Israel

April 13, 2010

The Simpsons came to Israel last week. Not the actors themselves or large foam rubber versions of the popular yellow characters dancing on ice; rather the show itself, which after over 20 years as the longest running sitcom on television, finally had an Israel-themed episode. I enjoyed most of it but there was an ongoing […]

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Life as a Board Game

April 8, 2010

Our life has become like a board game. Specifically, one that I created 38 years ago. When I was in sixth grade in 1972, my friend David Saunders and I decided to create a Monopoly-like game with a dice, play money, and various cards which players would pick from a pile and then act on. […]

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Vacation Tips for the Passover Holiday

March 31, 2010

It’s vacation time in Israel – the week of hol ha mod Pesach (the days in-between the Seder and the the seventh day of the chag) is a time when schools and many businesses close down and half the country seemingly takes to the parks and general great outdoors. Our family traditionally heads north to […]

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Running the Marathon – Israeli Style

March 24, 2010

My wife Jody and I ran the 10K in the Jerusalem Half Marathon last week. I’ve been running 3-4 times a week for over a decade already, but never in a competitive race. We didn’t come in first, but we were satisfied with a respectable time of an hour and six minutes. We arrived at […]

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