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About a year ago down in South Florida, I did a Scripps Howard column about young American Jews visiting Israel. One of the young people I interviewed was a 28-year-old cheeseburger devotee who was only hours away from her flight to Tel Aviv. She had made the decision to move to Israel for good.
I have long been an admirer of Chris Lee’s work in The Washington Post. As a reporter who deals primarily with the complex issues surrounding government agencies, Lee has a way of explaining intricate issues and spotting an unusual story that highlights key issues that others would overlook.
Katha Pollitt shows an occasional capacity for self-mocking humor — I remember her offer, several years ago, to rename her Subject to Debate column to Subject to Everett if two philanthropists by that name would send some jack over to The Nation. (Ideological bonus: Mother Jones reported in 1996 that Edith Everett is “staunchly anti-school prayer.” Blessed be!)
I guess the management of the Washington Nationals didn’t share my sentiments regarding Sunday’s Washington Post feature on the Bible in baseball. Team management particularly didn’t like a section of the story in which team chapel leader Jon Moeller nodded when asked if Jewish people are doomed to hell because they don’t believe in Jesus Christ.
It’s not every day that religious buildings are burned, which is why the razing of synagogues in the Gaza Strip made headlines today in the world’s major newspapers.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which often covers news stories that the news desk does not want, had an interesting feature this week about a quiet little political trend in American Judaism.
New York Daily News columnist Zev Chafets has published “The Rabbi Who Loved Evangelicals (and Vice Versa),” in the cross-town competition’s New York Times Magazine.
So you are rolling through the Newsweek story on tensions in American labor and how they may hurt the Democratic Party and then you hit this ghost — which is left unexplained by Howard Fineman, of all people. Boooo! There is, you see, a showdown looming between “Change to Win” coalition leader Andy Stern and AFL president John Sweeney. It’s complicated, so check out the story. But here is the part that spooked me:
