Many have summed up 2020 as an “annus horribilis.” You know a year is really, really bad when you have to reach all the way back to Latin to find a phrase that describes its awfulness. But Latin aside, many good things happened in 2020, too. People discovered resiliency, reassessed their goals and recharted their paths.

The worst year in world history wasn’t even a close contest… It was 1348, the height of the Black Death, during which as many as 200 million people died… In U.S. history, 2020 was well down the list at No. 8, just behind the 2001 terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the tumult of 1968’s riots and assassinations, the 1918 flu pandemic, the Trail of Tears of 1838, the 1929 stock market crash marking the beginning of the Great Depression, and at the very, very top, 1862.

When 2020 passes into the history books, it will carry more superlatives than a high school yearbook — and none of them good. Most deadly, hottest, most stressful, worst. It is not your imagination: By a host of measures, 2020 was the worst year many Americans will have experienced in their lifetimes.

Any challenge to Mr. Biden’s electors appears doomed, since upholding the objection takes a majority in both chambers. The Democratic House would use the opportunity to excoriate Mr. Trump a final time on his way out the door, and grown-ups in the Republican Senate are unlikely to play along. Hence the Trump crowd’s latest argument: that the power to invalidate electors rests with the joint session’s presiding officer—Vice President Mike Pence.

The stakes are these: If Republicans in the House and Senate don’t vote to affirm the Electoral College results — given the utter lack of any facts that suggest there was anything close to the fraud Trump is alleging — they will fundamentally undermine the idea that the vote is sacred and that the peaceful transition of power is sacrosanct.

I applaud Sen. Josh @HawleyMO for being willing to stand up for election integrity on January 6. The American people have a right to hear this debate in Congress that will be uncensored by Big Tech, the mainstream media, and the radical left.

…the particular concern at present is twofold. First, there’s the strategic consideration that the first anniversary of Soleimani’s death will be one that Iran wishes to mark… Next, there’s the tactical consideration of Iran’s deployment of military resources to proxy forces in Iraq… In short, an imminent Iranian attack on U.S. interests is likely.

Iran is almost certainly planning retaliation for Soleimani’s death, and both Trump and Biden have a duty to be vigilant about possible revenge, a real danger that deserves serious attention. Even if Iran forgoes action before January, the regime in Tehran is an ongoing threat to peace and stability in the region, a problem that Trump did not invent and that Biden will inherit.

Trump is not above idle threats. But too many dangerous conditions are converging: legitimate points of conflict with an increasingly desperate Iran; the distinct possibility of American casualties from an attack by an Iranian-backed militia; an American president who feels that power is being wrested away from him illegitimately.

Election Day might take place in an atmosphere of a post-coronavirus Israel. Of course, this is quite strange to imagine when the country is still at the beginning of a third lockdown and still has to contend with a vast number of daily infections. And yet, this lockdown feels different. It is the lockdown to end all lockdowns (or so we hope).

…it is the decision to impose a lockdown at a relatively early stage and before we reach 8,000 new infections a day and over 800 patients in serious condition as we did in the second wave that will increase the likelihood this lockdown is a relatively short one and limit as much as possible the damage it incurs… we will do everything in our power to make this third lockdown the last.

We all hope the vaccine drive will be the beginning of the end of the pandemic. The handling of the crisis, however, has been an unprecedented failure of management and of leading by example which demands that conclusions be drawn about the head man, Benjamin Netanyahu.

…when I started to regularly learn and teach written Torah from people who were not men, something in me almost imperceptibly began to feel different. It’s hard even a few months in to find the words to capture the different kind of settledness I feel in my chest when I give a dvar Torah that includes a Torah insight from someone like me. I thought that I was as close to the Torah as I could ever get, but I was wrong.

… I think, is the truly radical, albeit implicit, message of the Kranjec test. The historical exclusion of women from Torah study was not only hurtful to women (though that would be enough reason to want to remedy it); it also hurt Torah. Because of the loss of people with different experiences and perspectives, the Torah is haseirah, it’s lacking, it’s not its full self.

…not everyone who wants to see more women’s voices in Jewish text study believes the test is a good idea.

“It’ll create a sort of impression that a woman who finds her way onto a source sheet hasn’t done so because she is brilliant and erudite and profound but because of this positive discrimination,” said Gila Fine, editor in chief of Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers in Jerusalem.

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular… The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of “intersectional” power struggles.

I get the gist of #DisrupTexts, which is to methodically and deliberately look for books that better reflect all aspects of our cultural and historical heritage. But they’re doing it wrong… If anything the classics must be contextualized in the classroom with diverse and contemporary authors.

A quick search of the most commonly read high school texts turns up a lot of white male authors: Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Golding, Hawthorne. No one is saying some of these texts aren’t worthy of study. The concern is that there isn’t balance.