Editor-in-chief: David Suissa
December 16, 2021
Here are three takes reevaluating former President Trump’s controversial legacy on Israel in light of the recent interviews revealing Trump’s anger and dissatisfaction with former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump’s achievements in the Middle East are far greater than the left will ever admit, and his behavior in and out of office is far worse than the right will ever acknowledge. More Jewish liberals need to celebrate what Trump accomplished internationally, and more Jewish conservatives need to distance themselves from what he says as he does so.
Biden and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett are trying to restore bipartisanship and Jewish support. It won’t be easy, especially if Republicans take control of one or both chambers of the Congress in next year’s byelection. Working against bipartisanship will be Trump, Netanyahu and congressional Republicans…
Donald Trump’s attack on Benjamin Netanyahu must not be allowed to obscure the truth – their conflict is personal, not ideological. Trump is angry at Bibi, but the friendship between Trumpism and Bibi-ism has never been better.
Media messaging about the Omicron Variant can be hard to understand. Is it a huge crisis? A milder variant? Or do we not yet have the data to make a judgement?
Omicron poses a lower risk to most individuals, at least for those who are vaccinated, but the threat to the overall population is high.
Perhaps Omicron’s severity is lower by two-thirds, perhaps even less. But a strain that is one-third as deadly and three times as catching lands you pretty quickly in the same spot, death-wise. And a strain that is 70 percent as deadly but five times as catching lands you somewhere a lot worse.
The omicron variant is establishing itself to be the next unknown risk in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Evidence of this are uniformly aggressive and unfettered reactions… Yet, we are still learning much about this variant, including how virulent it is, how contagious it is…
With a renewed focus on voting rights legislation, Senate Democrats are once again discussing changing the filibuster rule, a rule which makes it very difficult to pass legislation with a simple majority.
Manchin has clearly said he has no intention of eliminating the filibuster.
The sooner Democrats accept this reality, the sooner they can move on to the other stages of grief. By pretending Manchin will agree to some fake one-time filibuster exemption, Democrats are only delaying inevitable pain.
You may not have noticed, but the Senate did something two times this month about which some senators spend 99 percent of the time saying, “No, no, we can’t do that, that’s impossible!” It suspended the filibuster. That’s right—twice.
Call me a skeptic, but I am not optimistic that we will see meaningful voting rights legislation pass Congress, largely due to the fact that there will not be a Democratic majority ready to overturn or meaningfully reform the filibuster rule.
The James Webb Space Telescope is bigger and more powerful than the famed Hubble Space Telescope and it is due to be launched into space on December 24th.
An informal and totally unscientific survey of randomly chosen astronomers revealed a community sitting on the edges of their seats feeling nervous, proud and grateful for the team that has developed, built and tested the new telescope over the last quarter-century.
The observatory is too big to fit into any existing launch vehicles, so it will leave folded up and then unfurl in space, like a flower blooming in spring, revealing its shiny, gold-covered mirrors to the universe. All kinds of components must deploy in just the right order, especially those that make up the observatory’s sunshield.
Originally conceived in the 1990s with a lowball budget of $500 million, the Webb telescope fended off threats to pull the plug as the complexity of the mission added years and billions to the accounting. It will be a bargain if the thing works.
It’s generally accepted that hardship, pain, and struggle are bad, but inevitable. If only we could eliminate them, surely we would. But should we? Here are three takes on the power of hardship to make us stronger, wiser, and more resilient.
I am grateful for everything I’ve been through. If I hadn’t struggled so much in my formative adult years, I wouldn’t appreciate what I have today. I see struggle as a good thing.
Unfortunately, I believe that many people today will do whatever they can to avoid struggle.
A new book by the psychologist Paul Bloom, called The Sweet Spot [is] a deep dive into the relationship between suffering and meaning, and why living a purposeful life means caring about much more than happiness. The book isn’t pro-suffering, and Bloom is very careful to distinguish “chosen” suffering from “unchosen” suffering…
Frankl argued that we often can’t control what happens to us in life, that we can control only how we respond to it. If we respond to terrible circumstances with tenacity, courage, unselfishness and dignity, then we can add a deeper meaning to life. One can win small daily victories over hard circumstances.
Move over sourdough bread, there’s a new pandemic trend in town. Here are three takes on how reading Tarot Cards has soared in popularity in the past two years.
Sales of tarot decks have doubled in the past five years, said Lynn Araujo, the editorial and communications director for U.S. Games Systems, and she estimated sales tripled during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic…
Interest in tarot and witchcraft has been steadily increasing over the past few years. “I think whenever we are in times where we feel like we don’t have control or we feel powerless, we gravitate towards tools and systems that can help us feel like we have agency,” says Grossman.
Rosen, 33, created the tarot deck as a 2021 fellow with LABA East Bay, the yearlong Jewish artists’ fellowship hosted by the JCC East Bay in Berkeley, California. It’s a project that fuses her passion for nature and text-based art with her Jewish roots.