I'd venture a bet that no American hates 'Prairie Home Companion' more than I do.
— Bari Weiss
One area where American Jews have something to teach Israel is religious pluralism, something that living in a democracy with a separation between church and state has helped us fine-tune.
At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, nonpartisan research group, at least two people left over the way the think tank responded to Mr. Trump's election.
Eminem knows that Republicans buy songs - his songs - too. His message to them is to stop buying.
If you crave an anti-new year New Year, consider adopting Rosh Hashana as your own.
One of my favorite things on YouTube is the famous 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University.
Culture should be shared, not hoarded.
I believe that babies should be vaccinated pretty much as soon as they exit the womb.
Outrage is something Donald Trump typically has in no short supply.
Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.
Mr. Trump had campaigned on attacking the weakest and most vulnerable in our society.
Donald Trump's election was a watershed moment. Even those like me, who had previously pulled levers for candidates of both parties, felt that Mr. Trump had not only violated all sense of common decency, but, alarmingly, that he seemed to have no idea that there even existed such an unspoken code of civility and dignity.
Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives.
To many American Jews, it is a truism that Barack Obama was the anti-Israel president. It was Mr. Obama who signed the Iran deal, which Israel portrayed as a mortal danger. It was Mr. Obama whose most contentious relationship with a foreign leader was with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I've been in love with both men and women. I've been ghosted by both men and women.
Israel's highest aspiration may be to be a light among the nations, but it is also a normal nation, where regular people want to go about their business without a religious authority having a say.
In Israel, there is no civil marriage. All elements of religious life - from the kosher certification of food to conversion to marriages and burials - are controlled by the rabbinate. In Israel, then, the official religion is not just Judaism. It's Orthodoxy.
Think tanks are chiefly supposed to provide independent expertise to policymakers. But they also seek to be politically relevant.
When Kendrick Lamar blasts Mr. Trump, he is preaching to the choir. When Eminem does it, there's a good chance Trump voters are actually listening.
There's no question that I am biased toward the Hebrew calendar over the Gregorian one.
There's no question that Ben Shapiro loves to provoke college students.
Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of 'cultural appropriation' is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism - the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures, and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones.
I believe the Earth is warming.
Dwayne Betts is the kind of man who should be receiving awards from the Connecticut bar. Instead, he hasn't been admitted.
In practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history.
The Women's March moved me.
Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld's famous aphorism that 'Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,' and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest - or costliest - of sins.
Liberals shouldn't cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what's liberalism about?
Who wants to live in a world where you can only stay in the lane of your birth?
I don't trade on my sexual identity in that way for political points. I think that's lame, and it's not my style.
The Jewish state has so much to teach diaspora Jews about resilience, innovation, energy, and optimism.
The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors.
Eminem isn't the first entertainer to part ways with his conservative fans.
I no longer believe that I'm going to be struck down by a punishing God.
I hate New Year's Eve.
Britain beat us to the abolition of slavery; the Isle of Man, New Zealand, and Finland all decided to give women the vote well before the United States. Eventually, we got smart and borrowed these egalitarian innovations.
I haven't watched MTV's annual Video Music Awards since Bill Clinton was president. I was wearing a plastic choker, and Alanis Morissette won for 'Ironic.'
Since Britain handed over jurisdiction of its former colony to China 20 years ago, the city has operated under the notion of 'one country, two systems.' That increasingly appears to be an empty slogan.
China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but 'woke' activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.
Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of 'intersectionality' than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March?
The leaders of the Women's March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations. Far from erecting the big tent so many had hoped for, the movement they lead has embraced decidedly illiberal causes and cultivated a radical tenor that seems determined to alienate all but the most woke.
Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of Absence are enlightening.
Tel Aviv was established in 1909 by a group of secular Jewish families; Judaism's origin story is about 2,000 years older.
Literally everything good about this culture comes from mixing.
