My early childhood was spent in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington D.C., which at that time in the early 1970s was a uniquely progressive place. Our lower-middle-class neighborhood, large looping cul-de-sacs of red-brick row houses, contained a more diverse population than anywhere I’ve lived since. Black, white and brown people, Christians, Jews, Hindus and…
At the first poinsettia sighting, many of my Jewish friends from New York or Los Angeles recall youthful feelings of exclusion. To them I say, get over it. If you want to know authentic Christmas envy, try growing up Jewish in a frostbitten North Dakota town with a Lutheran church on every other corner. In…
1) 1,525 Jews live in Idaho. 2) Idaho’s first congregation, Beth Israel, was founded in 1895. 3) Idaho’s first Jewish residents worked in mining camps. 4) The Falk family started Falk’s Wholesale Company in the early part of the 20th Century. It was later sold to Sears. 5) Moses Alexander was elected mayor of Boise…
1) Louisiana is home to 10,675 Jews, which is 0.2% of the state’s total population. 2) The first king of New Orleans’ popular Rex Carnival Mardi Gras parade in 1872 was Louis Solomon, a local businessman. 3) Judah Benjamin was a U.S. Senator from Louisiana from 1853 to 1861. After that, he became the Attorney…
One spring day in 1927, two New York City real estate speculators drove upstate to Dutchess County with a couple of girls and had a bit to drink. Before they got home again, they had bought half of Amenia, an old upstate mining hamlet ringed with dairy farms. By summer, they were selling bungalows on…
One of the the preeminent rabbinic courts of North America is set to add its first female board member. The Beth Din of America invited Dr. Michelle Friedman, the founder and chair of the Department of Pastoral Counseling at New York’s Yeshivat Chovevei Torah (YCT), to join its board. Founded in 1999, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah…
In no time at all, we went from being unknown to notorious. When I moved to Los Angeles in August 1977, perfectly intelligent, well-meaning Americans would ask me if we had roads and automobiles in Tehran, or if I had taken a camel to elementary school every day. The ones who did know Iran wanted…
Video: Nate Lavey U.S. spy agencies hired at least 1,000 ex-Nazis during the Cold War, a new book reports. According to Eric Lichtblau’s “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,” excerpted Monday in The New York Times, the CIA and other American agencies employed large numbers of Nazis as…
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