Like Roosevelt, Biden is employing a crisis to try to address long-neglected problems in our country. This is Big Policy. You might even call it Rooseveltian… after years of hesitation and half-steps, it’s thrilling to see truly bold efforts to tackle some of America’s deepest underlying problems.

Unlike some other famous first 100 days, like FDR in 1933, Biden’s plan primarily aims to reverse the direction of policy under his predecessor and stabilize society from the pandemic rather than setting out on a fundamentally new path that remakes public policy. Nonetheless, given the circumstances, the plan is extremely ambitious.

…this is only Mr. Biden’s “first installment,” as Sen. Bernie Sanders put it… The first point to understand is that this blowout has nothing to do with economic stimulus. Nearly all of the money is for income redistribution—some to people in genuine need, but most to advance long-term Democratic social policies, and to massage constituencies like teachers unions and state politicians.

… both Black people and Jews must look to the message of Warnock and Ossoff’s victories in Georgia. Resist hashtag activism. Look instead for local issues — education, policing, housing, voter registration — that can bring Black people and Jews together and move the country forward.

…a truism noted in the occasional Black-Jewish dialogues that took place during the Trump era: A common foe was re-emerging. That foe was a white American Christian nationalism, seemingly hellbent on affirming that Blacks and Jews were neither whites nor Americans nor worthy of Christian fellowship.

As the Black-Jewish alliance imploded in the late 1960s, many Blacks complained that Jews had lost sight of that foe.

Black Americans and Jews share an important, though not always harmonious, historical bond, as the scholar Edward S. Shapiro writes in his 1994 essay, “Blacks and Jews Intertwined.” It was this particular kinship that Warnock echoed on Wednesday morning, as he fit himself and Ossoff into history. “We now represent the state of Georgia. I think Abraham Joshua Heschel — the rabbi who said when he marched with Dr. King, he felt like his legs were praying — I think he and Dr. King are smiling in this moment,” Warnock told CNN. “We hope to make them proud.”

Responding to the controversy, the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa said: “For many years, we’ve familiarized our students with a broad variety of opinions from across Israel’s political spectrum. We respect the students’ right to express their opinion and are proud of their involvement in issues at the heart of Israeli society. We hold respectful dialogues and intend to continue this tradition.”

We do not believe, however, that B’Tselem should be given a blank check to peddle this pernicious lie in the country’s schools. Therefore, we support Education Minister Yoav Gallant’s directive to keep groups calling Israel an apartheid state out of the schools, a decision breached Monday when El-Ad delivered a Zoom talk to Haifa’s Hebrew Reali School.

How dare they say that I, an Arab Israeli who served along with Jewish soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces and managed hundreds of Jewish employees, live under an apartheid regime? How can anyone say our society is living under an apartheid regime when among us you will find doctors, judges, and even lawmakers? How can you say Samer Haj-Yehia lives in an apartheid regime when he is the head of the biggest bank in Israel? B’Tselem has already broken the record for hypocrisy.

Arab attempts to build an Abrahamic narrative may challenge not only the anti-western agenda of Islamist extremists, but also European politicians who frame Muslims as inherently anti-western, antisemitic and threatening. It may present an opportunity to Europeans seeking to strengthen inclusive and pluralistic narratives of western identity, and counter Islamist radicalisation.

It was in mid-20th century America, especially after the Holocaust, that the idea of the west as Judeo-Christian gained wide acceptance. This relatively benign use of the term – as an inclusive, lowest common denominator reference to the faith-based roots of western values – has since been applied by many mainstream European politicians.

But lately the term Judeo-Christian has been picked up by the radical right to serve a different political agenda.

Our sages have indicated that as we approach messianic times, our story will mimic that of Isaac and Ishmael, who came together to bury their father and achieved an understanding. Israel is in the process of moving closer to its natural roots in the East. This could be Trump’s greatest legacy—moving the Jewish nation back to its traditional moorings by helping us connect with our traditional neighbors.

The peace accords are the catalyst for long overdue rapprochement and friendships with our Abrahamic cousins.

How should we read? We would read as gourmands eat, gobbling down huge gobbets of text. No one told me not to pivot abruptly from Valley of the Dolls to The Brothers Karamazov—so I did; anymore than they warned me not to intersperse passages of Fanny Hill with those written by Frantz Fanon—so I did that, too. By reading indiscriminately, I learned to discriminate—and learned also to comprehend: for it’s only with the acquisition of large data sets that we also develop schemas supple enough to interpret new material.

Scholars have been conditioned to respond to talk of likes and dislikes with embarrassment, if not outright contempt. The facade of critical detachment may be on the way out, however. Some academics—most prominently, Rita Felski and Andrew Miller, each with a new book on the subject—invite their colleagues to fess up to the feelings they have for what they study, interpret, and even—dare I say it—love.

…for Saunders, however emotive his morality may be, fiction is fundamentally moral; a badly-made story lacks moral authority and a well-made one can lead us to love better. Saunders is not wrong to trace the pulse of many literary problems to our strivings after moral salvation: Great works contain multitudes. The Russians teach us that lasting literature is not merely “something decorative,” Saunders writes, but “a vital moral-ethical tool.”

Any consideration of Spector’s production work will emphasize the wall of sound as his defining musical contribution, which certainly isn’t wrong. But to my mind the wall is really just the most prominent symptom of a more important legacy: that Spector was the first producer to so strongly and consequentially believe that music made for teenagers was something that ought to be taken seriously.

Phil Spector died Saturday as an inmate in California, convicted of the 2003 murder of Lana Clarkson. By then, other facts had emerged about his volatile, erratic, gun-toting behavior, notably in Ronnie Spector’s 1990 memoir, “Be My Baby,” which detailed his abuses during their seven-year marriage. Some listeners may well decide that all of his music is poisoned. But it is also inextricable from pop history.

RIP Phil Spector. A genius irredeemably conflicted, he was the ultimate example of the Art always being better than the Artist, having made some of the greatest records in history based on the salvation of love while remaining incapable of giving or receiving love his whole life.