Covid-19 hospitalizations are up a daunting 72% and ICU admissions are up 69% over the past 14 days, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday. He said officials have asked for 815 extra health care workers from staffing agencies, and other reinforcements have been requested from the federal government.

…because California has fewer hospital beds per capita than all but two states, it takes less to overwhelm the state’s health infrastructure.

Even before the new restrictions came into effect in parts of the state on Monday, counties in the San Francisco Bay Area announced last week that they would voluntarily take on the new limits.

…it will take some time for the effects of the stay-at-home order to become clear, and in the meantime, the numbers will keep going up. The average number of L.A. County residents dying daily of COVID-19 is now about 39, nearly quadruple the number from early November, and is expected to worsen.

Misinformation about the new coronavirus vaccines has proliferated on social media during the pandemic, including through viral anti-vaccine posts shared across multiple platforms and by different ideological groups, according to researchers.

There are many steps in the process of development, and in this case we had new funding mechanisms that made it possible to start quicker. We’ve shortened some of the administrative processes. We have new technologies, but the steps involving safety have not been shortened. They have not been compromised. And no vaccine will be delivered to the public before it really has enough confidence.

The unfortunate American fact is that Black people in this country have been well-trained, over centuries, to distrust both the government and the medical establishment on the issue of health care… I hope that America can overcome Black people’s trepidations about this vaccine, but it is impossible to say that that trepidation doesn’t have historical merit.

Israelis do not have a great track record in predicting the relations between their government and Israel. Sometimes they get it right (Donald Trump), and sometimes they get it wrong (George W. Bush). Often, they forget that the U.S. President is elected to govern a different country, not Israel, and thus have unrealistic expectations about him.

Biden’s own position, considered strongly favorable to Israel in the before times, will now be painted by the right as “anti-Israel” when contrasted with the Trump precedent.

Biden’s policy guarantees Iran will develop a nuclear arsenal and the missiles to deliver them… It goes without saying that Israel cannot accept this state of affairs. Just as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was compelled to oppose Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, so Israel has no choice but to strongly oppose Biden’s plans.

This strange and unpredictable year has made me yearn for routine, but it’s also helped me gain clarity. I see that forcing a tradition just because it was a part of my childhood is not what my kids need. They need love and connection — no menorah required.

I confess that as I read her well written personal story, I felt no pain. For some bizarre reason, the State of Israel, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish federations, continue to invest hundreds of millions in reaching out to mixed couples to somehow “save” them…

If you love her, let Sarah Prager go. At least there’s a good chance her daughters won’t grow up to become anti-Semites.

Oh, is it NYT publishes thin, uninformed, somewhat self-hating article on Chanukah o’clock again? I can’t even look.

Shortly before Pesach a number of Sephardi rabbis issued a ruling which excited a good deal of attention in Israel. Given the emergency of the pandemic, they said it would be permissible for isolated and vulnerable people to join a family Seder by Zoom, provided the computer was switched on before Yomtov… koach d’heteira adif, “the strength of leniency is greater”.

Coronavirus has not started a new halachic era, but it might mark the beginning of the post-Holocaust era. It is the first crisis requiring halachic boldness and creativity since the 2012 passing of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv (b. 1910), who was the last of the top-tier Torah scholars who achieved scholarly greatness before the Holocaust.

Among the questions rabbis have had to confront during the corona crisis: Is it permissible to constitute a Jewish prayer quorum over internet-enabled videoconference? Can married couples be physically intimate if the woman cannot immerse in a ritual bath because they are closed for public health reasons? How should burials be handled if authorities prohibit Jewish rituals around the preparation of bodies? Can synagogue services be livestreamed on Shabbat?

White government employees, thinking that their task is to work for the good of the entire body politic, are forced to attend Critical Race Theory workshops where they learn there is no body politic at all, only impure white people who collectively conspire to violate innocent people of color everywhere, using the power of the state to do so.

[Critical Race Theory is] a well-established, diverse body of work. At a time when racism is on the rise… teachers and pupils can benefit from the tools and resources developed by critical race theorists to understand how racism operates across society, including in education.

Jews have nothing to fear from Critical Race Theory… To a people like the Jews, for whom racial designations are always an awkward fit, Critical Race Theory offers the insight that race is not a Black/white binary but instead a socially constructed tool for inclusion and exclusion.