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The kosher-industrial complex
When there's a need, a free market will answer it

November 18, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

IN THE 1960s and 1970s, when my four siblings and I were kids, we weren't allowed to eat Oreo or Pepperidge Farm cookies. Tootsie Rolls were off-limits, too. So were Bazooka bubble gum and Jelly Bellies. And though we often heard the commercial jingle proclaiming "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee," that was a claim the Jacoby youngsters could never verify empirically.

Our parents weren't opposed to sweets. But we grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home where kashrut — the kosher dietary laws — were observed. And none of those yummy treats was kosher.

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Three cheers for congressional gridlock

November 14, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

DONALD TRUMP and his liberal media critics rarely see eye to eye. But as they headed into last week's midterm elections, the president and much of the press were in apparent agreement on what it will mean to have a Congress divided between a Republican Senate and a Democratic House of Representatives.

"This is really an election between greatness and gridlock," Trump told a rally in Fort Myers, Fla. Unlike some presidential pronouncements, this wasn't an off-the-cuff remark. Trump warned repeatedly in the campaign's last weeks that returning Democrats to a majority in the House "would plunge our country into gridlock."

Journalists said the same thing.

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Three reasons to vote No on Question 3

November 4, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

QUESTION 3 on the Nov. 6 ballot in Massachusetts asks voters whether they want to retain or repeal a 2016 state law that makes it illegal to discriminate against transgender people in places of public accommodation. That law specifies that any place with separate facilities for males and females, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, must allow access to individuals on the basis of their "gender identity," regardless of their biological sex.

The measure doesn't appear to be very contentious. If a Suffolk University/Boston Globe poll released on Monday is correct, 68 percent of Massachusetts voters intend to vote Yes on Question 3, to keep the law on the books.

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A massacre in Pittsburgh and the 'hardening' of Jewish America

October 29, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

A POLICE CAR, unmarked but with blue lights flashing, was parked in front of my Brookline synagogue when I arrived for Shabbat services late Saturday afternoon. Since Orthodox Jews don't turn on the TV, radio, or computer on the Sabbath, I knew nothing about the horrifying slaughter that had occurred at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh six hours earlier. But my local police department knew, and had dispatched an officer to be on hand as congregants like me showed up for the late-Sabbath worship — just in case.

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Outraged — but only when it's convenient

October 24, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

AMID THE SHOCKWAVES of condemnation that followed the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a number of conservatives have been upset not at the savagery inflicted on the expatriate Saudi dissident and journalist, but at the widespread outrage over his grisly death. Some have openly disparaged Khashoggi, deriding him as an Islamist who supported the Muslim Brotherhood and palled around with Osama bin Laden. Others have mocked his calls for liberal reform as "a cover" for his "real work" of praising terrorists and attacking Israel.

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