Some Democrats were more succinct and compelling than others, but they all seemed to understand that their job is to create a tsunami of opposition to right-wing gamesmanship and highlight the GOP’s opposition to positions that key voters — such as suburban women — find objectionable (e.g., striking down the ACA).

One cannot help but conclude by the actions on the part of the Democrats on Monday that the case against confirming Judge Barrett is a very poor one, indeed. Let’s face it: Her qualifications are impeccable, her originalist philosophy now quite mainstream, and her dispassionate and self-possessed temperament the very best one could hope for in a judge.

When public confidence in democracy is gone, it doesn’t always come with an audible snap. What’s about to be lost won’t come in the form of a viral video this week. We may miss it as it happens on the Senate floor, but it will become the real story of these hearings. Whether the press can capture the enormity of what’s at stake is almost irrelevant.

America’s fall surge seems chaotic and scattershot, like every chapter of this pandemic. In the U.S., it is concentrated in the Midwest and northern Plains, especially in the Dakotas, Montana, and Wisconsin. COVID-19’s resurgence isn’t just happening in America. Infections are now rising in Spain, France, and the United Kingdom—all of which currently have more new daily cases per capita than the U.S. This summer, it seemed as if America’s COVID-19 response was uniquely horrific and embarrassing. Today, the group of embarrassed countries is more crowded.

Part of the problem is America never really suppressed its Covid-19 cases to begin with. Think of a disease epidemic like a forest fire: It’s going to be really difficult to contain the virus when there are still flames raging in parts of the forest and small embers practically everywhere. The country always risks a full blaze with each step toward reopening and with each failure to take precautions seriously.

In 1918, after waning through the long summer, Spanish flu came roaring back to claim nearly 200,000 lives, just in that one month, just in the United States. Until recently, this second-wave surprise — it was the worst of three to hit the country between 1918 and 1919, most likely because a rare mutation made the virus more deadly — was a bit of obscure medical trivia. But as our current pandemic enters its ninth month, armchair epidemiologists have been wringing their hands over it.

The court of public opinion shows little mercy and at time, this affects law enforcement where officials, seeking to maintain public interest, opt for a harsher approach to the issues at hand.

There’s no need to elaborate on the police’s determination to enforce restrictions on protesters. Both the mainstream media and social media have been flooded with pictures of their brutal enforcement.

The public’s faith in police work is dwindling, according to a survey by the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University, the results of which were published on Sunday… a follow-up poll held amid the second lockdown saw the Israel Police’s approval ratings drop, with only 21 percent of respondents saying the police have kept up performance as they did in mid-March.

Neither Armenia nor Azerbaijan borders Israel or any country with an influential Jewish population. Yet the Jewish state and the history of Jewish persecution are inevitably instrumentalized by both sides: Armenians invoke their own 20th-centry experience with genocide to garner sympathy with Jews, and Azerbaijan reminds the world that it was the rare majority-Muslim country to recognize Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union.

While Azerbaijan has positioned itself as a key strategic partner to the U.S. in the region, often cynically deploying its relationship with Israel as an example of its good-faith partnership, its close ties to an increasingly dictatorial and expansionist Turkey, as well as its oft-overlooked relationship with Iran and Russia, demonstrates that Azerbaijan is only out to serve its own interests, even if that means transferring millions of dollars into Russian and Iranian state-linked companies…

While Armenia is using Israel for various political reasons, the volume of economic, humanitarian and security cooperation with Azerbaijan cannot be overestimated, and neither can its role in addressing issues of mutual interest in the European Union, which Armenia does not provide.

As a cultural product, the NBA has also given the country something else it badly missed. At a time when Hollywood’s storytellers are largely on ice, many of us long to give our imaginations over to new stories. While we’re suspended in a collective state of limbo, we’re wondering when all this will be over. We’re craving the closure of a real ending, and sports, with its clear winners and losers, gives us that.

The playoffs epitomized the craziness of 2020, with games played in arenas empty save for the teams and a small number of staffers and family members, masked and kept at a distance from one another. Yet the strange and uncomfortable circumstances only make the Lakers’ title more remarkable.

After our national coronavirus (over)reaction and the NBA and other sports shut down, I was not happy with the decision to restart play with few or no spectators on hand, turning the games into pure television productions complete with fake crowd sounds… Shooting a crucial free throw at the end of an NBA playoff game in an empty “bubble” at Disney World is hardly the same as doing it as a part of the visiting team in front of 20,000 screaming fans.

Memoirs and autobiographies often start with the very moment of the author’s birth. But the way that Riva Lehrer describes herself as a newborn is shocking and heartbreaking — a telling example of the both the power of her prose and the impact of the story she sets out to tell in “Golem Girl: A Memoir” (One World/Random House).

“The day I was born I was a mass, a body with irregular borders,” she writes. “Doctors foretold that I would be a ‘vegetable,’ a thing without volition or self-awareness.”

The death of George Floyd while in police custody on May 25 and the protests that followed were a national reckoning. Alisa Pomerantz-Boro, the immediate past president of the Cantors Assembly, the largest organization of cantors in the world, knew she wanted to use her voice for change. “That’s what cantors do,” she told the Journal.

Ninety-one-year old Holocaust survivor Irving Roth and 36-year-old former radical Islamist Kasim Hafeez are now close friends. After Hafeez noticed the concentration camp number on Roth’s forearm, he had it imprinted on his own arm as a sign of solidarity.

The story of the two men, told against a background of historical and current global anti-Semitism, is the focus of the documentary “Never Again?”