Michael Moore's American traitors. The Jew who lit up New Year's Eve. Best holiday meme. Nancy Pelosi. Covid predictions. 330 American rabbis want a ban on speaking gigs for Israeli fascists
Newsletter #129 Jan 2, 2023
Happy New Year everyone. Now back to my perennial obsessions:
POLITICS
*Michael Moore created this rogues’ gallery: insurrectionists who, despite betraying the People and the Constitution, were re-elected in November. To protest these shameless miscreants being seated in Congress tomorrow, Moore asks us to “Take a moment and let history record your objection.” Pick up the phone now and call the Capitol (202-224-3121). Give the operator your zip code & when connected to your Representative’s line, leave a voicemail expressing your opinion in the strongest terms.
*Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, and legislative miracle worker, leaves her leadership post after 20 years. The splendid HBO documentary, “Pelosi in the House,” made by her daughter Alexandra, revisits Nancy’s triumphs (Obamacare!) and losses. Much as I admire her successor, Hakeem Jeffries, watching Pelosi’s cool-headed courage during the Jan 6th siege of the Capitol made me wish she was still in charge.
ISRAEL
* It’s a shanda (disgrace)! Not one Orthodox rabbi is listed among the more than 330 American rabbis who signed a pledge to block extremist members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government from speaking in U.S. synagogues and communities. Please resist all efforts by right wing Republican Jews or Evangelican Christians to give these racist Israeli cabinet ministers or MKs a platform in your community.
NATURE
*Last month’s historic megastorm frosted Ontario homes in solid ice. I think you’ll agree that nature’s handiwork, however surreal, is also stunningly beautiful.
COVID
* Pandemic predictions for 2023 are reassuring except in the Northeast where “The highly-contagious Omicron subvariant XBB has surged to more than 50% of COVID-19 cases.” (Reuters). Wouldn’t hurt to mask up.
JEWS
* Jews “invent” New Year’s Eve. In this video Jacob Starr’s granddaughter, Tama, describes how a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who produced the jumbo signs in Times Square, was commissioned by another Jew, Adolph Ochs, publisher of the NY Times, to create the first ball-dropping ceremony in Times Square (12/31/1908).
* Sharon Kleinbaum, above, right, with her wife, teachers’ union leader Randi Weingarten, will step down next summer after 30 years as spiritual leader of NYC’s Beit Simchat Torah, the nation’s preeminent LGBTQ synagogue. Kol ha’kavod Sharon.
* The Forward’s list of “125 American Jews Who Changed Our World” is a feast of past and present trailblazers dating back to 1897 when the Yiddish-language newspaper was founded. (Today it’s available online in both English & Yiddish). Women on the list include sculptor Louise Nevelson (1899), poet Emma Lazarus (1903), union leader Rose Schneiderman,(1911), anarchist Emma Goldman (1919) actor Lauren Bacall (1944), philosopher Hannah Arendt (1951) social justice activist, feminist, and Congresswoman Bella Abzug (1970), disability rights advocate Judith Neumann (1977), cofounder of Black Lives Matter Alisa Garza (2013), first Asian-American rabbi Angela Buchdahl, (2014), and Supreme Court Justice RBG (2020). Plus lots of men.
ANTI-ANTISEMITISM
*To quote the best line of the holiday season, here’s the question that went viral on Christmas day: “If Jews run the world, why is everything closed?”
BOOKS
* In Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, Matti Friedman describes with notable literary grace the little-known singing tour of Israeli battlefields during the 1973 Yom Kippur war by the poet, crooner, and God-wrestling prophet of love and doom. Read my review of Friedman’s book here.
SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
*Much gratitude to Tablet magazine for naming mine among its 5 favorite author interviews of 2022. The lively conversation between me and Mark Oppenheimer, a co-host of the podcast “Unorthodox,” starts at 27:50 on this timeline.
*Thanks, too, to the Jewish Book Council for including me and SHANDA in its “Spotlight” on touring authors.
*Click here for my upcoming of book talks and join me when and wherever you can.