identity

Jewish Carols

December 19, 2011

I actually wrote this post two years ago but haven’t been brave enough to publish it until now. It’s about a secret love of mine: Christmas carols. Technically, as  a (nonobservant) Jew, I know I shouldn’t enjoy them or sing them, a knowledge that was imparted on me by my mom who, when I was learning Silent Night in third grade, acted as if she was personally experiencing the Inquisition when it gets to the part about yon Virgin and ...

6 comments

The Internets has changed how we think about people.

November 30, 2011

I’ve always been under the assumption that I’m very leery of trusting the internet, because, everyone on the internet is a creep murderer and that I would never want to give up all my data to Zuck and the Gootch, but a couple of events recently have convinced me otherwise. The first thing that happened is that a couple of weeks ago, my grandpa discovered a long-lost relative merely from the fact that he goes to a pharmacy, she’s a ...

9 comments

Don’t major in history for the love of Charlemagne

July 26, 2011

Everyone got their outrage hats on? Here’s mine: Let’s go. This article. (via Leora and others) Let’s start parsing, shall we? William Klein’s story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor’s in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents’ Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school. So that’s the normal paragraph.  How does it read to me? William Klein’s story may sound familiar to his fellow ...

31 comments

I Love America: Air Conditioning and Public Utilities for All

July 5, 2011

Let’s talk Fourth of July and why I love America. So this weekend we went to the beach with the Borscht family and a bunch of other friends, two of whom were visiting from Russia and made me think.  There are some inherent differences between Russians from Russia and Russians that have been in America for a while.  For example, Russians from Russia don’t do summer well, because summers in Russia are colder than spring in Tora Bora.  As I ...

14 comments

Life after “Life After Zionist Summer Camp”

June 21, 2011

It starts the minute I read the first paragraph. That feeling of vague anger and helplessness. Because I’ve been reading and thinking about this issue ever since I decided that Israel was something I needed to be reading and thinking about. And I’ve been experiencing all of the things that Benedikt did for the past ten years, maybe more.  In different stages.  In different places. The olives, the AIPAC meetings, the beach, the sunflower seeds, the 1967 maps, the rallies, ...

25 comments
Page 1 of 19 1Last »

{ }