Today I am attending the funeral of my cousin, Stanley Glogover. As a boy in Poland his first name was rendered as Szlamek; in Hebrew he was Shlomo. Naming him after King Solomon was prescient, as it took all his…
The difficulty in writing about Orthodox Jewish political issues in Israel is our lack of antepredicamental orientation. Or, if you don’t want to look that word up, we lack the ABCs. Yet, since the question of Yeshiva students and the…
As a “powerful influential member of the media” — to borrow the felicitous Limbaughian formulation — I get invited often to screenings of new films. I try to decline politely enough to keep the door open for the rare occasion it…
My uncle and aunt moved to Israel in the 1970s, leaving my twenty-something cousin behind in the dating scene of New York City. She didn’t find it safe to greet suitors alone in her apartment, so she had her dates…
Who is the biggest star in Hollywood today? He is bigger than Brad Pitt, whose zombie movie is not as undead as he would like. This star is even bigger than Bogart was back in his day. HINT: his name…
The joke used to be that the way to tell Bill Clinton was lying was if he moved his lips. The updated version should go something like this: the way to tell Barack Obama is being truthful is when he…
The news lately about the umbrella of government surveillance claiming to protect us from the rain of terror leaves me high and dry. My feelings on the matter are not without some nuance, and they should be prefaced by some…
This is about my personal Memorial Day. Forty-four years ago today my father’s father, Aaron Homnick, shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving me doubly bereft. My mother had died a year earlier and I was beginning to think all my…
This past Saturday night, the true crime show 48 Hours on CBS brought on a law enforcement expert who commented on the case at hand. Yet it struck me he had inadvertently offered a disturbing insight into Barack Obama and…