12.31.2009
Sunny (!) San Francisco, Snow-Tipped Trees, Blue Bays, and Cotton-Candy Sunsets
Why would anyone go to the North Pole if they could be here?
We tried to get some of the world's best coffee/tea, but it was closed.
Emerald Bay:
Labels: travel
12.30.2009
Airport mincha, ads in security area trays, and what does TSA do, anyway?
- I should make an effort to get out and about in NYC more often, since there is lots to do and see in NYC that I haven't gotten anywhere near seeing yet.
- I should get out of NYC more often, even if just for the weekend, by visiting friends who live within cheap-bus-commutable distance of NYC. Even Riverdale and Teaneck.
Labels: travel
12.17.2009
Happy Chanukah!
Labels: Chanukah, Jewish holidays, links
10.15.2009
My Life in Talmud Torah (With Emphasis on Talmud): Loss (Part 2)
It was July 1997.
I had just turned eighteen years old and had spent at least twelve years working my ass off in day school so I could get good grades and get into a good college. I had gotten the good grades (mostly), been accepted to the good college, and was about to take a year off to go and study in Israel. First, though, I worked full-time in June and August in Boston, so that I could spend July in New York City, living with a lovely couple with three sons on the Upper West Side, and studying Torah full-time.
I couldn't get enough of Torah. Torah had been like a drug for me towards the end of high school, which was a bit of a rocky time for me emotionally. It was some sort of panacea or a life raft. I clung to it with all my might, in the belief that it, and only it, had the power to save me by righting all the many wrongs that I identified in the Orthodox Judaism in which I had been raised.
I was young and idealistic. I had had a young (far younger than I am now), idealistic, male teacher in high school who had promised me that women learning Torah on a high level would remake the world of halacha and cure all that ailed The System. I believed him. (See this and this for more on that youthful vision, particularly as it relates to Orthodoxy vis-a-vis feminism.) I loved learning Gemara, in particular. At the summer program for high school students that I attended in July 1997, I learned from the best teacher I had ever had, a recent graduate of their unique "I can't believe it's not smicha [rabbinic ordination]!" certificate program. (Yes, it was called that even then.) All the cool people--the thoughtful people, the people who cared about the things that I cared about--seemed to be professional learners and teachers of Torah. I thought I might study in Israel for a year, go to college, and return to this institution or another to collect my own "I can't believe it's not smicha!" certificate. I was the cream of the Modern Orthodox intellectual crop; I was hope for the future of Modern Orthodoxy. I was told that it was for people like me that the founder of my day school had created it. I had questions, of various theological sorts, but they were taken seriously and I was promised that, in time and with enough learning, I would find answers.
And then I went to Israel. And there, in what I always thought of as yeshiva, they told me, "The world is not ready for women to learn Gemara five days a week."1 I knew that this was not true, since I had been learning Gemara five days a week since I was twelve years old, and had just done it for the entire month of July--five mornings a week and one or two evenings a week of night seder--and the world had not said, "Boo." I was not the only one who wanted Gemara five days a week. Several of us, in the highest Gemara class available to us first year students, petitioned the administration for more Gemara, and they said no. We gave them a very logical reason for wanting more Gemara, namely, that with Gemara on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, we spent each Monday reviewing the complicated material, especially the ever-convoluted rishonim, especially as taught through the not-always-textually-accurate-although-it-claims-airtight-logic Brisker method, from the previous Wednesday, since it had all but been forgotten in the intervening four days. They told us that if we stayed in Israel for a second year, at their esteemed institution, that we could have Gemara five days a week.
I came back to the US without a vision for a future for myself in Jewish learning. The pain I felt at the time is still palpable today. I wasn't sure that I wanted to keep Shabbat or kashrut. I started off my college career attending minyan three times a day, then gradually reduced to once a day, and pretty soon, I was only going on Shabbat, and not too long after that, I stopped going to shul on Shabbat. (I never stopped going to kiddush or Shabbat meals at Hillel, even though I sometimes left them early. Thank God for my unhealthy food issues!) I never really even tried to learn in college.
Oh, that's not quite true. I didn't want to give up that all-consuming vision or dream that I had had, so I went to New York, back to the institution of which I had so many happy memories, for a week of learning over Christmas break. I felt nothing inside. It was boring, empty, and meaningless.
Then I went back to Israel and studied for a few weeks at another institution at which I had been happy during my year in Israel (not the one that denied me full access to the Torah to which I clung). It was an unmitigated disaster. I found Gemara boring and halacha pedantic. Someone told us that the Rambam said that it was not assur, but merely inadvisable, to hug one's brother/sister (of the opposite gender). The teacher made some kind of big deal out of the fact that the Rambam had not outright forbidden hugging one's sibling, as if that was some kind of prize to cling to. That pretty much sealed the deal: This whole Jewish learning thing--heck, this whole adherence to the formalism of halacha thing--was absolutely not for me.
But, I needed the community. I never stopped needing the community. When I no longer cared about learning or davening, I went to shul for the community. I was lucky to have friends who learned and davened and made Shabbat meals, and that kept me in. The world is too huge and lonely a place without Shabbat and the community that traditional observance of Shabbat automatically creates--of people who live within walking distance of each other, of people who play Taboo and Set and Trivial Pursuit together, of people who sponsor seudat shlishit in memory of their dearly departed.
1. This is a direct quote. It was seared into my brain instantly and has never left. If people only knew the impact of their words, especially their words of discouragement, maybe they would think before they spoke....
Labels: gender, Jewish community, life, Torah (broadly defined)
10.07.2009
"Understanding the Anxious Mind," New York Times Magazine article
One-room schoolhouses, American adults who have never heard of Alfred Hitchcock, and other oddities
Labels: Jewish community, travel
9.18.2009
Shana tova!
I think he may have a future career as a pulpit rabbi.
Labels: meta, Rosh Hashanah
9.13.2009
My Life in Talmud Torah (With Emphasis on Talmud): Discovery (Part 1)
Let me start from the beginning.
It was September of 1991. I was twelve years old, and about a month away from celebrating my bat mitzvah with a birthday party at the local art center with all of the girls in my grade. The only thing that marked the occasion as specifically Jewish was that I gave a d'var Torah on Parshat Noach. (My birthday was in the Hebrew month of Tammuz, but that was an inconvenient time to celebrate a bat mitzvah.) I had survived nine years of day school education and already learned most of Chumash and the first few books of Nach.2
We sat down in the classroom next to the lunchroom-auditorium and opened up a paperback Gemara textbook with a reprint of the first chapter of Tractate Berachot from the Vilna shas and took out our highlighters.
The teacher read, in that sing-songy Gemara voice:
He read and translated and we all diligently took notes. We highlighted assiduously--one color for each sugya, or section. Tests required us to recall key phrases:מאימתי קורין את שמע בערבין? משעה שהכהנים נכנסים לאכול בתרומתן עד סוף האשמורה הראשונה דברי ר' אליעזר. וחכמים אומרים עד חצות. רבן גמליאל אומר עד שיעלה עמוד השחרMe'eimasai korin es shma b'aravin? Mehsha'ah shehakohanim nichnasin lehechol b'trumasan ad sof haashmorah harishona...
דתניא, "as we learn in a b'raisa"
תא שמע, "come and hear"
I remember, at some point that year or the next, sitting on the ledge in the grassy courtyard of my school, helping a classmate understand a difficult section of Gemara. It suddenly occurred to me that this was really, really fun. It was a kind of game, or logic puzzle, and when I had cracked it, it felt wonderful!
I had never really had that sense about anything purely academic before. I pushed myself to excel in school because that's what was expected of me, so that's what I had come to expect of myself. I really enjoyed the few art projects we got to do in elementary school, where I had also enjoyed writing and "publishing" short books, and had liked learning life sciences in seventh grade, but had no particular passion for anything else I studied in school. I was terrified of getting bad grades and I worked very hard to prevent it. I kept the fact that I enjoyed learning Talmud to myself for the next several years.
When classes were first tracked, in seventh grade, I started out in the regular, non-honors track for limudei kodesh [Judaic studies]. Over the course of high school, I gradually moved up into the honors class.3 Sometime around tenth grade, my first year in the honors limudei kodesh track, I was first willing to admit to enjoying learning Torah, especially mishna and Gemara. The summer before eleventh grade, I went to an open [to women] beit midrash in my neighborhood and learned the mishnayot of Masechet Kilayim, by myself, with my buddy, Pinchas Kehati. I learned lots and lots of Hebrew words for different kinds of squash. It was thrilling. I don't really remember why, but it was. After that experience, I decided to enroll in what was called "Super Talmud," wherein I spent two extra periods a week studying Gemara, on top of our usual 9-10 weekly periods of Gemara. This meant that I had class until 7:30 pm one night, instead of the usual 5:43 pm high school dismissal time. During eleventh grade, I read As A Driven Leaf and considered spending the summer between eleventh and twelfth grade studying Torah, full-time, in Israel. I had one phone conversation with the infamous Baruch Lanner about it, during which he made a strange comment about my stellar PSAT scores that sounded vaguely sleazy to me. I decided to go on a less intellectual, more social, and most importantly, free, summer program in Israel, instead. I think that it was during this time when I started learning Torah, on my own, in the beit midrash of a local shul between mincha and maariv. Perhaps that was the following year, though. I brought the mishnayot of Masechet Sukkah to Israel with me, and learned some of them.
By the fall of my senior year of high school, I was committed to spending the following year studying Torah, full time, at a yeshiva in Israel. I later found out that others called women's institutions "seminaries," but I never heard that word in high school. As far as I knew, both men and women went to yeshiva in Israel after high school and before college, and the programs of study were roughly similar--hours of gemara every day, with some chumash and halacha on the side. I was interested in an alternative to the institution I ended up attending, which I thought might offer some of the amenities of the men's programs, including prepared meals (to allow more time for learning) and a more sophisticated approach to Talmud study, but that didn't pan out. (The program didn't happen.)
Stay tuned for Part 2, hopefully later this week!
_______________________________________________
1. I had to fortify myself with mint chocolate chip and Jamoca ice cream just to sit down to try to write about this, but that's gone by now, and now here I am, just starting to try to put this down into words. What's that you say? I shouldn't always eat to get myself to write? It's bad to reinforce the association between sugar/fat and productivity? Too late! I started eating M & M's to write my papers back in high school, and, uh, 70 pounds later, here I am. (Whoops.)
2. I remember that I had learned from Parshat Lech Lecha through the end of Breishit in 2nd and 3rd grade, I think Shmot in 4th grade. I don't remember which Chumash I learned in 5th or 6th grade. We did the first half of Breishit in 10th grade, and I think the second half in 11th or maybe 12th grade. I learned Joshua in 4th grade, Judges in 5th grade, Samuel I in 6th grade, Samuel II in 7th grade, Kings I in 8th grade, and maybe Kings II in 9th grade? After that, we learned Jeremiah, Psalms and the Five Megillot), and Isaiah. I wouldn't say that the Chumash or Nach curriculum was very well organized at the school that I attended.
3. I believe that I was placed into the regulars class, rather than the honors class, because I asked too many questions in elementary school. I was severely under-confident and over-anxious in school (and in life), and I asked, more than was deemed necessary, what words meant throughout my Judaic studies career in elementary school. I wish that someone had worked with me on feeling more confident in the things that I knew (because I *did* know things), rather than telling me (as they did), to "Stop asking questions." Grrr...
Labels: childhood, life, Torah (broadly defined)
9.09.2009
Uh, yeah...
Although I am a woman, not a man, and I learned a little Spanish in high school (not French), this rang resoundingly true. Except for the last panel!
Hat tip to BZ and mazal tov on his recent marriage! (And move to a new city and starting grad school!)
Labels: fun 'n games, meta
9.02.2009
sort of sad
Labels: Israel, life, New York
Apartment-hunting on the Upper West Side and in Washington Heights
As I'm sure you've already discovered, apartment-hunting in NYC can be very stressful, although it may be better now that fewer people have jobs and thus fewer people are flocking to NYC.
There is a website called BangItOut.com with lots of apartment listings, especially if you're open to moving into apartment with one or two other usually SS/SK (shomer-Shabbat/shomer-kashrut) roommates. It is best for the Upper West Side, but also has a few apartment listings in other parts of NYC and other cities. You can put an ad there if you're looking, although it's best to be proactive and read through the listings. This is true in general in NYC, since there seem to be a lot more people seeking apartments (especially of the less expensive, not gross variety) than apartments/rooms available. The burden is really on the seeker to find a place, not the people with the apartment to find new roommates.
Other UWS-specific listings that may help include:
- Maalot West, the less popular sibling of Maalot Washington (the way to find an apartment with a room open in Washington Heights if you're looking in the SS/SK market)
- the KOE (Kehilat Orach Eliezer) weekly Shabbat announcements with listings (I don't see it online, since KOE just apparently redid their website)
- the Kehilat Hadar weekly Shabbat announcements with listings (http://www.kehilathadar.org/community/postings)
- Look on Craigslist for Upper West Side and Morningside Heights, if you're willing to go a bit further north (past 100th St.). Note that some "Upper West Side" apartment listings will be well into Harlem, which is all fine and good, except that some parts of Harlem (most?) are outside the Upper Manhattan eruv.
- There is a great website called Maalot Washington with lots of apartment listings, especially if you're open to moving into apartment with one or two other roommates.
- You can put an ad on the Maalot listserv in addition to posting on the Maalot Washington website and responding to ads there and on the listserv.
- Look on Craigslist for Washington Heights and also Hudson Heights. (Realtors started calling the fancier part of Washington Heights "Hudson Heights" after it started gentrifying/going upscale. Hudson Heights would generally be the area north of 181st St. and West of Fort Washington Ave.) I saw some apartments that way.
- You can put an ad on the Migdal Or listserv by writing, I think, to midgalor [at] gmail.com.
One way that people I know have been successful at finding apartments directly through the real estate manager/landlord is by literally walking the streets in the neighborhood in which you are interested in living and talking names/numbers off of buildings or speaking to supers/doormen about the availability of apartments in that building.
- 20th: W. 59th to W. 86th St.
- 24th: W. 86th to W. 110th St.
- 26th: W. 110th St. to W. 133rd St.
- 33rd: W. 156th to W. 179th St.
- 34th: W. 179th St. to the top of Manhattan (includes Inwood)
Labels: New York, real estate
9.01.2009
Re-Emergence
- turned 30 (not so traumatic, I have fantastic friends and family!)
- spent another month working in Jerusalem and loving it
- packed up and moved back to New York City
- gone to my very first National Havurah Institute
- lived in a bedroom without furniture (sleeping on futon) for two weeks
- spent eight hours moving boxes and furniture from my brother's apartment and a storage facility back to my apartment
- moved back into my old bedroom, and, more critically, my old bed!
- welcomed my new roommate
- hosted a Friday night dinner for two sisters, one cousin, one brother, and one future sister-in-law
- hosted two sisters and a cousin in my apartment (we all slept together in my air-conditioned bedroom on one very hot Friday night and had a lot of fun remembering being kids and sharing a bedroom at my grandparents' home over Thanksgiving)
- spent 6+ (7+? 8+?) hours going dress-shopping with my mother and suit-shopping with my father (for my brother's wedding in May)
- threw, together with three siblings and one cousin, a 60th birthday party for my father and uncle (twins), which was attended by 20+ family members
Labels: life
6.28.2009
Losing my early adopter credibility?
- 1986: I first used a computer (Mac Plus).
- 1990: I designed birthday party invitations for my eleventh birthday using SuperPaint. (See this and comments for people waxing poetic about MacPaint!)
- 1996: I got e-mail and first surfed the web (Lynx!). I remember the first time I saw a web browser with pictures! It was so cool--even cooler than when we got our first color TV circa 1986 (1984?).
- 1996: I learned Adobe Illustrator (was that the layout program? I can't really remember what it was called).
- 1997 or 1998: I taught myself HTML from a book and created my own website, hosted on Geocities, z"l.
- 1998-1999: I had a Mac laptop. Laptops were only just beginning to become popular. Most of my friends during my freshman year of college only had desktops. (Note that I said "had" rather than "used." This laptop was a hand-me-down from my uncle, and the battery didn't work at all. It sometimes would randomly turn off in the middle of working on something, and the only way to get it to turn back on again was to take the battery out and slam it back in quickly while hitting the power on button. Also, I think that it had an Ethernet port, but no Ethernet card, so I'm not sure I could get on the internet with it. In fact, I'm fairly sure that I couldn't. So I mostly worked in the nearby computer lab or in the basement of Hillel.)
- 1998-2003: I used Pine to check my e-mail in college, even after a web-based interface became available around 2001 or 2002. Pine was so much faster! (Attachments were a bit of a pain, though, since they required opening an FTP program.) When I graduated college, I got a free Unix shell account through Lonestar so I could just transfer my address book and all of my folders over without losing any data. I still have that account, and still (mostly) remember the important shortcuts in Pine.
- 1998-2003: I backed up all my papers on the server, using FTP.
- 1999: I got a laptop (blue, ibook, clamshell) without a floppy disk drive. This was seen as fairly insane at the time. I had a readable CD drive, but did not write to CDs. I mostly transferred files on and off using FTP, but I broke down eventually and bought an external floppy disk drive that I used maybe six times in all the years that I had and used this computer. I used this laptop continuously and all over the world from 1999 until 2004, when the "B" key issued it's last dying breath and the "S" and "I" keys were also sticky. Also, it didn't have a wireless card, which started being impractical around 2004.
- 2000: I got my first cell phone (Qualcomm! Do they still make cell phones?) during my semester off from school. (I used it for about six months, then stopped service when I returned to school.)
- 2001: I bought a Palm (actually, a Handspring, z"l) so I wouldn't have to drag my laptop around while I was doing thesis research in libraries in Israel and Cambridge. It lasted until early 2006, when I got a Palm T|X with WiFi to replace it. I still use the T|X, but the battery only lasts a few hours, so I don't use it much.
- 2003: I joined Friendster. (Remember that?)
- 2003 or 2004: I joined Facebook--one of the first 2200 to join!
- 2004: I started my first blog (I think it was 2004--might have been 2003--it was a secret one that didn't last long).
- Twitter / Home
- All You Need to Know to Tweet on Twitter - NYTimes.com
- Ten Things you Must Know before Using Twitter | Tech N’ Marketing
- Twitter search sites: The three best, and all the rest | Webware - CNET
- WeFollow: Twitter Directory and Search, Find Twitter Followers
- Hashtags
- How #FollowFriday Works - Mashable: The Social Media Guide
- 400 Twitter Feeds of Job Openings, Job Postings and Job Leads Around the World | JobMob
- Nest Unclutterer (Very good for automatically weeding out the spammers who keep following you in the hopes that you will follow them.)
- Slashdot Book Reviews Story | The Twitter Book
- Smart Bitches | Me and My Twitter
- How to Avoid Facebook and Twitter Disasters - washingtonpost.com (I think this is mostly self-evident, but maybe you won't.)
Here are some recent articles about Twitter:
- Nerd Approved
- Religion_State
- Women's Refugee Commission
- JewLearn: myjewishlearning.com
- American Jewish World Service
- Jerusalem Blueprint
- Chronicle of Philanthropy
- Reuven Werber: This is one the few individuals I follow whom I do not personally know; he has a lot of interesting links to share.
- JLearn 2.0: Jewish learning in a digital world
- David Pogue: NYT tech columnist
- Foodimentary
- GrammarCops
- Lippman Kanfer Institute: The Lippman Kanfer Institute is an action-oriented think tank for innovation in Jewish learning and engagement.
- Feministing
1. This is not quite a fair account of my life. For example, I did not purchase a digital camera until 2008, mostly because of financial considerations. I did not want to get a lousy one, and could not afford a decent one, so I stuck with my film camera. Also, I have never owned a cell phone that took photos or was smart in any way, shape, or form. Again, entirely an issue of not being able to afford either the phone or the data plan that would make a smart phone smart. There are surely other examples of general technological lag in my life that I am just not thinking of right now.
Labels: links, technology
6.26.2009
The serious drinking problem of our generation
Labels: fun 'n games, history, science/health/environment
6.18.2009
Evening on Jewish Psychology--"Bereavement and Loss: Between Separation and Continuity"
- Bereavement as a Decree of the Dead so as not to be Forgotten from the Heart [that's a terrible sound translating and this is why translation is so difficult!]
Professor Mordechai Rotenberg, Recipient of the Israel Prize 5769 and Head of [יושב ראש? acting head?] the Center for Jewish Psychology - Films of Memory: A Narrative of Cinema an Coping with Bereavement
Mrs. Bilha Bachrach, Alumna of the Maaleh Film School and Lecturer in School for Social Work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Clinical Perspective
Dr. Baruch Kahana, Lecturer in School for Social Work and in Clinical Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mrs. Rut Gombo (sp?), clinical psychologist - Educational Perspective
Rabbi Ronen Ben-David, Principal of Neveh Chana Boarding School - Midrashic Perspective
Dr. Ido Hevroni, researcher in Rabbinic literature
Labels: Israel, mental health, Torah (broadly defined)
6.17.2009
Only one very unfortunate typo out of many
6.13.2009
Read It Later: Savior or Satan?
Science, Health, Etc.
- Basics - In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue - NYTimes.com
- Discovery Online, The Skinny On ... Falling-Asleep Twitches [I get these all the time. And all these years, I thought I was the only one! Now I know what they're called!]
- Most Kidney Donors Lead Long, Healthy Lives - US News and World Report
- My Genome, My Self - Steven Pinker Gets to the Bottom of his own Genetic Code - NYTimes.com
- Pen Mightier Than Passion: Scientific American Podcast
- Personal Health - Babies Know - A Little Dirt Is Good for You - NYTimes.com [I always thought so.]
- Picture Emerging on Genetic Risks of IVF - NYTimes.com
- Researchers unlock secrets of 1918 flu pandemic | Science & Health | Reuters
- Slashdot | How the City Hurts Your Brain [Interesting.]
- They're Playing My Song. Time to Work Out. - New York Times
Language
- Language Log: Whom shall I say [ ___ is calling ]?
- Op-Ed Contributors - The I's Have It - NYTimes.com
- Who you callin' ungrammatical? - The Boston Globe
Mental Health
- Combined Therapy Is Reported to Ease Anxiety in Children - NYTimes.com
- Health Buzz: America's Happiest States and Other Health News - US News and World Report
- Mental Illness Doesn't Predict Violent Behavior - US News and World Report
- Task Force Recommends Screening Adolescents for Clinical Depression - FOXBusiness.com
- The Associated Press: Study: Zoloft and Cipralex better than other drugs
Technology
- $200 Laptops Break a Business Model - NYTimes.com
- 25 Years of Mac: From Boxy Beige to Silver Sleek [Yay, Mac! I remember our family's Mac Plus, circa 1986, very well. And the first time I saw a color monitor. It was amazing!]
- As Facebook turns 5, a look back east | The Social - CNET News
- Craigslist Agrees to Curb Prostitution Ads - NYTimes.com
- Freedom to surf: workers more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure : News : The University of Melbourne [Too busy
surfing the netdoing work to read this...] - Google Claims Orphan Books, Raising Alarm in Academia - NYTimes.com
- Hoping to Make iPhone Toys as a Full-Time Job - NYTimes.com
- idle.slashdot.org | California May Reduce Carbon Emissions By Banning Black Cars
- Itineraries - Internet Use Grows at Meetings, as Do Challenges - NYTimes.com
- Kindling a Revolution: E Ink's Russ Wilcox on E-Paper, Amazon, and the Future of Publishing | Xconomy
- Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers - NYTimes.com
- Open Up Government Data - Wired How-To Wiki
- Ping - Consumers Are Choosing Simpler Electronic Gadgets - NYTimes.com
- Slashdot | Facebook Nudity Policy Draws Nursing Moms' Ire
- Slashdot | Google To Monitor Surfing Habits For Ad-Serving
- Slashdot | Is Your IM Buddy Really a Computer?
- Slashdot| YouTube Symphony Orchestra Set To Debut At Carnegie Hall [Cool!]
- Social RSS reader Streamy now open to everyone | Webware - CNET
- The Medium - I Hate My iPhone - NYTimes.com
- What Google should learn from Apple | Technically Incorrect - CNET News
- Wired Blogs: Gadget Lab
Food
- Eating Food That's Better for You, Organic or Not - NYTimes.com
- Is a Food Revolution Now in Season? - NYTimes.com
- 'Miracle fruit' turns sour things sweet - CNN.com
- Op-Ed Contributor - The Maggots in Your Mushrooms - NYTimes.com
- The Bacon Explosion - Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog. - NYTimes.com
- What to do with the kale, turnips, and parsley that overwhelm your CSA bin. - By Catherine Price - Slate Magazine
Gender
- Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union » Mobile County Agrees to Reintegrate Boys and Girls in Public Schools
- Do Pregnant Women Have Rights? | | AlterNet
- Dora the Explorer No More? - On Parenting
- globeandmail.com: Men open up like never before
- Lesbian Communities Struggle to Stay Vital to a New Generation - NYTimes.com
- Ynet המתגיירות טובלות, הדיינים צופים - יהדות
Families
- 2 Kids + 0 Husbands = Family - Some Mothers, Single by Choice, Stick Together - NYTimes.com
- Commentary: Are eight babies more than enough? - CNN.com
Education
- Op-Ed Contributor - Education Is All in Your Mind - NYTimes.com
- SAT Changes Policy, Opening Rift With Colleges - NYTimes.com
- The Big Test Before College? The Financial Aid Form - NYTimes.com
Fun
- Holiday Movies - Five Breakthrough Performances - NYTimes.com
- Schroeder Played Real Beethoven in Charles M. Schulz's 'Peanuts' Strip - NYTimes.com
- Top 10 Wired Shadow Photos, Decided by You
Israel
- A model of biblical proportions: man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's Temple - Telegraph
- Barkat may stop J'lem light rail project | In Jerusalem | Jerusalem Post
- Farmers find monastery beneath Israeli soil - CNN.com
- Israeli Nonprofits, Shaken by Madoff Scandal, Regroup - NYTimes.com
- Not Just a Holy Land: Why the Deification of Israel Hurts Us | PresenTense
Judaism
- My Jewish Learning: Orthodoxy's Limitations
- My Jewish Learning: Orthodoxy's Power
- N.Y. Hasids take Pennsylvania Amish on a neighborhood tour - Haaretz - Israel News
- Religious Leaders Battle Bill to Open Abuse Claims in New York - NYTimes.com
Pesach
- CapeCodTimes.com - Quinoa fritters make great pre-Seder snack
- Kosher-For-Passover Matzo (Parve, Passover)
- Moses is Departing Egypt: A Facebook Haggadah
- Orthodox passover rebels do away with Ashkenazic ban on legumes - Haaretz - Israel News
Obama, Etc. (remember, I started this list in October)
- A Portrait of Change - Nation's Many Faces in Extended First Family - NYTimes.com
- Barack Obama's Rabbi - Capers Funnye - Profile - NYTimes.com
- Commentary: Will Obama use 'Facebook politics'? - CNN.com
- Editorial - Barack Obama - Editorial Board - Endorsement - NYTimes.com
- Op-Chart - How Much Is Your Vote Worth? - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist – Barack’s Continental Coolness - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - Our Election Whopper - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - The Endorsement From Hell - NYTimes.com
- RNC chairman condemns controversial Obama song - CNN.com
- Sea change in U.S. politics after race for president - International Herald Tribune
- The Associated Press: Obama wants to overhaul health care; can he do it?
The Economy
- Appeal of the Dollar Adds to Woes Abroad - NYTimes.com
- Bad economy? Do what you love - CNN.com
- Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It - NYTimes.com [Yeah. I relate to this one.]
- Budget concerns force states to reconsider the death penalty - CNN.com
- Editorial Observer - With the Downturn, It’s Time to Rethink the Legal Profession - NYTimes.com [Kind of glad I didn't go to law school any of the many times someone told me that I should.]
- Endowment Director Is on Harvard's Hot Seat - NYTimes.com
- Findings - Oversaving, a Burden for Our Times - NYTimes.com
- For Papers, a Downsizing Trickle Becomes a Flood - NYTimes.com
- Harvard: the Inside Story of Its Finance Meltdown - Forbes.com
- Humanities Ph.D.'s Are Anticipating Hard Times - NYTimes.com [Kind of glad I didn't go to grad school to get a PhD in History any of the many times someone told me that I should.]
- In a slump, camping comes into vogue - CNN.com
- The Reckoning - Bush's Philosophy Stoked the Mortgage Bonfire - Series - NYTimes.com
- The Reckoning - From Midwest to M.T.A., Pain From Global Gamble - Series - NYTimes.com
- The Reckoning - WaMu Built an Empire on Bad Loans - Series - NYTimes.com
- Unannounced Layoffs Hit Workers by the Thousands - NYTimes.com
Real Estate
Travel
World News
- Karzai: Afghanistan to review criticized sharia law - CNN.com
- Memo From Beijing - Chinese Learn Limits of Online Freedom as the Filter Tightens - NYTimes.com
- Often Split, Arab Leaders Unite for Sudan's Chief - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - China to the Rescue? Not! - NYTimes.com
A Selection of New York Times Op-Eds
- Op-Ed Columnist - Hope Amid the Gloom - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - Miracles Take Time - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - Paging Uncle Sam - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - Pregnant (Again) and Poor - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - The End of Philosophy - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - The Price Is Not Right - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Columnist - What Life Asks of Us - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Contributor - My Children Made Me Do It - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Contributor - My Secret Life - NYTimes.com
- Op-Ed Contributor - One Ride Forward, Two Steps Back - NYTimes.com
Misc
- Advertising - The Body as Billboard - Your Ad Here - NYTimes.com
- Commentary: We owe oldest Americans an apology - CNN.com
- Custom Solutions to Office Clutter - NYTimes.com
- Dept. of Disputation: Red Sex, Blue Sex: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
- Findings - For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It - NYTimes.com
- GM, Segway partner on two-wheel city vehicle | Green Tech - CNET News
- Gobekli Tepe: The World's First Temple? | History & Archaeology | Smithsonian Magazine
- Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary - NYTimes.com
- Health System Program That Guarantees Doing Things Right the First Time, for Flat Fee, Pays Off - washingtonpost.com
- Messinger hears White House message on Darfur | Capital J | JTA - Jewish & Israel News
- Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab - NYTimes.com
- Slashdot| Huge German Donation Marks Wikipedia's Evolution
- Suddenly, infrastructure is cool again | Coop's Corner - CNET News
- The Gospel of Consumption | Orion Magazine
- The Swiss Bank UBS Is Set to Open Its Secret Files - NYTimes.com
- True Fromance - New York Post [This may be the best article in the whole bunch!]
- Virginity pledges don't mean much, study says - CNN.com
Labels: gender, Israel, links, Pesach, science/health/environment