Friday Night Lights
At 5:00 p.m. on a recent Friday, a gaggle of chatty teenagers in yarmulkes and tzitzit poured out of the Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. The students, from Blobstein’s Yeshiva in...
View ArticleDaybreak: Elections in France, Greece and Egypt
• Golden Dawn, the Greek Neo-Nazi party whose members had in weeks past attacked a Jerusalem Post correspondent and beaten a female politician on live television, maintained most of its seats in...
View ArticleMorsi Code: Egypt Goes to the Polls
Unless Egyptian politics are among your father’s most cherished hobbies, it’s possible that you missed the swirl of election news out of Cairo yesterday. Here’s what happened: The Muslim Brotherhood...
View ArticleSeventy-Two Hours in Jerusalem
The shape of our Birthright Israel trip is taking form, and it resembles the classic three-act structure of any good yarn. In Act I, there is an initiating action and a rough encounter—in our case,...
View ArticleTel Aviv Strip
Today in Tablet Magazine, Josh Lambert discusses Israeli cartoonist Asaf Hanukah’s weekly strip The Realist, now collected into a single volume and translated into appreciative French. Tel Aviv’s Comic...
View ArticleZionism, After Miss Porter’s
I was 15 years old when I left home for the first time. I had been accepted to the prestigious Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Ct., with promises of impressing college admission offices and future...
View ArticleMy Neighbor’s Son, the Doctor
Today in Tablet Magazine, Irin Carmon hunts the shifting meanings of the word firgun, a wonderful yiddish term with no equivalent in English. Hebrew’s Special Pride
View ArticleThe Super Bowl of ‘Huppah Dreams’
Each Monday, we choose the most interestingly Jewish announcement from that Sunday’s New York Times Weddings/Celebrations section. Normally this would be a difficult task given the insane number of...
View ArticleOpinionator Runs Headlong Into a Jewish Mother
The New York Times has an online section known as the Opinionator, where a reader searching for even more commentary and opinion can have his or her thirst electronically slaked. Today, the front page...
View ArticleThe Pigskin Brothers
Today in Tablet Magazine, Rebecca Meiser spends time with Mitchell and Geoff Schwartz of the Cleveland Browns and Minnesota Vikings, the first pair of Jewish brothers to play in the NFL since 1923....
View ArticleThe Stakes of Being Skinny
I’m in bed at our hotel in Jerusalem on Saturday night, with Dan Caspi, the 20-year-old Israeli soldier who joined our trip Friday, asleep in the twin bed next to mine. Our evening ended about an hour...
View ArticleSchool Ties That Bind
Each day, The Scroll will feature a post from our new Birthright Israel travel blog, The Roll. Get on the bus here. Critics of Birthright Israel sometimes complain that the 10-day program only offers a...
View ArticleA Billboard Grows on the BQE
Today’s image of the day comes from the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, where according to sources, a billboard—sponsored by the Congregation of Yad Moshe— has been erected to warn commuting Jews about the...
View ArticleSundown: Parlez Vous Hébreu?
• Despite losing the Israeli vote, socialist Daphna Poznanski-Behamou of Tel Aviv was elected to represent French expats living in Israel, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Malta, Cyprus, the Vatican, and San...
View ArticleFwr Vwls 4 Futr Englsh?
Might Twitter and text messaging push vowels out of English? Could the language end up looking more Semitic than Germanic? I’m used to seeing abbreviations on Twitter, chat programs, and text messages...
View ArticleSwastikas, Taken in Stride
Last Friday morning, the day stretched luxuriously before me: cooking soup and cholent for the Shabbos guests, a walk in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, a visit to a friend—and no freelancing at all, easy to...
View ArticleHBO’s True Blood Libel
The fifth season of HBO’s vampire-centric series True Blood is now under way. After four years of not touching a Jewish character or Jewish issue with a 10-foot stake, the series finally went there....
View ArticleDaybreak: V-Day
• Michigan State Rep. Lisa Brown of the glorious motherland of West Bloomfield performed the Vagina Monologues with other politicians and playwright Eva Ensler before an audience of thousands at the...
View ArticleOn Doing the Opposite
During a speech this weekend to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney drew applause and laughter from the group when he answered a question about what he would...
View ArticleTruth-Telling at Rabin’s Grave
Hints of our tour educator Yoav’s personal politics have trickled out over the past seven (it’s only been seven!) days of knowing him. He’s fond of citing the Prophets and referring to various...
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