This afternoon I had the chance to watch Armando Galarraga go up against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Comerica Park, home of the Detroit Tigers. This was my first opportunity to see the Detroit Tigers pitcher live since his eventful, near perfect game ten days ago. Watching him on the mound, I kept thinking how graceful…
Cross-posted at Jewish Techs Photoshop might not have been around a century ago, but the altering of images to change history has been around for a very long time. A couple weeks ago I ventured into the basement floor of the Steimatzky’s flagship bookstore in the Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem. The three-story store is located…
Cross-posted at Jewish Techs Before this past weekend, Rabbi David Nesenoff was a virtually unknown rabbi who lives and works on Long Island. When his teenage son finished his high school exams and uploaded a 2-minute video of Helen Thomas expressing her anti-Israel views on the Whitehouse lawn, Nesenoff gained global fame. That 2-minute video…
Here is the complete video of Rabbi David Nesenoff (RabbiLIVE.com) asking Helen Thomas her views on Israel. Watching it, one gets the idea that Helen Thomas has always held these opinions, but can no longer keep them to herself now that the almost 90-year-old has lost her filter and says whatever she’s thinking. Listen carefully…
In May 1996 I sat in the Breslin Center arena in East Lansing as I watched my then girlfriend (now wife) graduate from Michigan State University. A year prior I watched President Bill Clinton speak to the crowd at Spartan Stadium for MSU commencement. The speaker at this graduation was none other than Helen Thomas,…
Smoked salmon, or lox, has long been known as a staple fare at Sunday brunch in Jewish homes. In fact, Jewish people who claim their Jewish identity as only secular are known as “Bagels and Lox Jews.” Well, now an ultra-Orthodox group of rabbis, the Chevra Mehadrin of Monsey, New York, have included lox on…
Corey Haim is not the first Jewish teen actor from the 1980s to die tragically and certainly not the first child actor to overdose. River Phoenix, whose maternal grandparents were Jewish emigrants from Hungary, died of a drug overdose on Halloween morning in 1993. Now, teen heartthrob Corey Haim has died of a drug overdose…
The Los Angeles Lakers’ Ron Artest decided to have the word “Defense” shaved and painted on his head for today’s game against the Orlando Magic. However, using the English word “Defense” apparently would have been too, uh, normal for Ron Artest. Maybe he felt that would be something that Dennis Rodman would have done during…
In Judaism there is a concept called “yichus,” which basically means lineage or pedigree. In popular parlance “good yichus” is used to describe someone with connections to a distinguished family. I was thinking about this term the other day while reading Time Magazine’s very witty Joel Stein’s column. Stein decided to research his geneology and…
I was in Israel staffing a Birthright Israel trip in 2004 when I learned about the Indian Ocean Tsunami while watching CNN in my Jerusalem hotel room. The following year, I was staffing a University of Michigan Hillel mission to Ukraine when the tragic news about Hurricane Katrina came on the news in my Kiev…