Cheerleaders for Aliyah

January 4, 2008

Last Thursday, my wife Jody and I roused ourselves out of bed at the ungodly hour of 4:50 AM in order to arrive at Ben Gurion Airport, not for a trip to some exotic destination, but in time to greet an El Al flight of 191 new immigrants making aliyah to Israel. The process was […]

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SCUBAduper

December 28, 2007

I’m generally not one to shy away from adventure. I’ll be the first to travel to exotic locations like India and Egypt. 20 years ago I jumped out of an airplane. But there was something about SCUBA diving that freaked me out. After all, human beings can’t naturally breathe under water. So the idea of […]

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Hamster Education

December 20, 2007

After the fourth litter, we started to reconsider whether to continue our inadvertent role of playing birthing hospital to a family of incestuous rodents. 14-year-old Merav has had hamsters for a year and a half now. We started with just one, a male, but Merav felt he’d be lonely, so we got him a companion, […]

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Good Cop Bad Cop

December 14, 2007

We were driving home from a trip to attend a game of the new Israel Baseball League at Kibbutz Gezer near Ramle when we saw the flashing lights on the side of the highway. A policewoman was waving a lit flashlight/wand beckoning us to pull over. I knew it was just a spot check; from […]

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Bodhichitta and Boogie

December 6, 2007

My wife Jody and I have been getting into meditation lately. Both of us had tried it in the past and dropped it. Now we’re back on the path. We’ve even taken to reading some literature on meditation before bed which relates to Buddhist subjects such as tonglen practice and boddhichitta – most commonly translated […]

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Bully for the Teachers

November 30, 2007

Last Saturday night we went to a house concert performed by Laurie Ornstein, an English teacher turned folk singer who has taken to busking for a living during the protracted high school teachers strike. The concert was lovely – full of new and classic protest songs, some rewritten to focus attention on the teachers’ current […]

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Thanksgiving in Israel

November 22, 2007

(This week’s post is a reprint from last year answering the perennial question of “what do you do in Israel on Thanskgiving?” Enjoy!) Every year, just about this time of the month, I get a flurry of emails from friends and colleagues all with pretty much the same message. It goes something like this: “Happy […]

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Purging a Lifetime of Memories

November 16, 2007

My parents announced recently that they would be moving out of our childhood home of over 40 years into a retirement community in a few months. That meant that the time had finally come for me to go through all the papers and junk that’s accumulated in the closet of my old room since I […]

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3 Days in New York with Kids

November 1, 2007

On our recent trip to my brother’s wedding, we stopped off in New York before heading to California. We had three days and three kids who had never spent any time in Manhattan before. We packed it in and had a great time. Here’s some of what we did: Bike Riding in Central Park Entirely […]

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A Puzzling Wedding

October 26, 2007

My brother Dave and Jen got married two weeks ago and it was a very puzzling wedding. You see, Dave runs Dr. Clue, the world’s largest corporate training organization focused exclusively on using treasure hunts as a team building activity. Jen, who has a doctorate from Stanford in economic sociology, has worked with Dave at […]

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