I don’t revisit my old work. I’ve been writing this weekly column for four and a half years now, and I never reread old pieces. Because for me—and I’m sure I’m not alone among opinion journalists in this regard—each essay I pen represents a catharsis of sorts. I had some bee in my ...

Another Passover come and gone. And with the weather getting warm and dry here in L.A., I’m gonna have to make sure to take down the tree before it becomes a fire hazard. We Jews don’t blow the shofar for Passover—that’s a Yom Kippur thing. In fact, to be honest, I’ve never blown a shofar ...

I won’t use her real name, because she’s not a public figure. Indeed, she may be dead for all I know, although I certainly hope she isn’t. I met Tressa in 1996. She was a tiny, buxom Cambodian, barely five feet tall, who served as my “friend with benefits” for the next four years. Her ...

As a teen in the early 1980s, no issue was more important to my friends than the “imminent” threat of nuclear war. “Reagan’s gonna blow up the world! The Soviets just want peace. If we don’t ban the bomb, World War III will kill us all.” We young ’uns found cohesion and camaraderie in ...

America needs a Dennis Moore moment. Indeed, I doubt there’s ever been a nation more in need of a Dennis Moore moment than the U.S. in 2019. What’s a Dennis Moore moment? I thought you’d never ask. Monty Python were not known for going heavy on political themes during the heyday of the ...

We Jews love our golems. We’ve been loving our golems for thousands of years, and what a strife-free history we have to show for it! In case you’re unfamiliar with the golem fable, I’ll give you the CliffsNotes edition. There’s no one single version of the story, and each retelling might ...

Several weeks ago I mentioned, somewhat in passing, my years working as a Tea Party activist. My intention was to point out the advantages we had back then, compared with today’s pro-Trump ground-level activists (what one might call the activist base...the people who are more than just voters but ...

Menachem Schneerson was the beloved leader of the Lubavitcher sect of Hasidic Jews. So esteemed was this New York-dwelling rebbe that many of his followers believed he was the long-awaited Jewish messiah, and that after death he’d rise in triumph and lead the Jews to a promised land where the ...

For today’s sermon, I shall read the Parable of the Crip Who Slipped in Shit. My high school friend Mark was a hardcore gangbanger, one of the hundreds who “attended” our school (“attended,” as in, ditched most of the time). He loved to proudly display his many battle scars. I’d ...

Typically, when people use the phrase “a hill to die on,” they’re not speaking of a literal hill. So it’s a wonderful, terrible irony that the hill upon which science has chosen to die turns out to be an actual hill. What are the odds? That hill is Mauna Kea, located in Hawaii. If ...