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"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff) LATEST POSTS:
- Dennis Prager v Cedars-Sinai Lawsuit
- Dennis Prager Through Randall Collins: Interaction Ritual Chains
- What is a ‘Received Idea’?
- Jordan Bardella: The Manufacture of Normality
- Everyone Became Television: Bourdieu’s Warning and the 2026 Iran War
- Marine Le Pen
- The Coalition-Proximity Rule
- Nigel Farage
- Bernard Haykel: A Life Between the Text and the Gun
- Walker Connor (1926-2017)
- Benedict Anderson and the Nation as Imagination
- Anthony D. Smith: The Student Who Kept the Question and Rejected the Answer
- Ernest Gellner
- Eric Kaufmann: The Man Who Made the Majority Visible
- Dominic Cummings: A Biography
- Steve Lopez: The Last City Columnist
- California Historian Kevin Starr
- Stephen Kotkin: A Life in Power
- William T. Vollmann: An American Life in Excess
- Rod Dreher: A Life in Exile
BEST POSTS:
- * The Enlightenment Wasn’t Enlightened (6-23-26)
* Mr. Burge Draws The Line (6-23-26)
* 'Improving on Democracy' (6-17-26)
* People Leak To People Who Are Fun (6-11-26)
* Why Does Australia Produce So Many Great Journalists? (6-11-26)
* Steve Wynn and the Press: Power, Litigation, and the Contest Over Las Vegas (6-3-26)
* Sheldon Adelson and the Journalists (6-3-26)
* The Vigilant Animal: Thinkers Who Reject the Myth of Human Gullibility (6-2-26)
* The Cost of Refusing the Misunderstanding Myth (6-2-26)
* Show Me How It Travels (6-2-26)
* The Norm Explainers (6-2-26)
* Centering Marginalized Voices (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Washington Post put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What would it look like if the Financial Times put its reader first? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for the Los Angeles Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* What It Would Mean for The New York Times to Put the Reader First? (6-1-26)
* Why Wembanyama Lives on the Perimeter (5-31-26)
* The Emotional Palettes Of San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco & Sacramento (5-27-26)
* The Administrative Capital: Sacramento Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* San Diego - The Quiet Republic (5-27-26)
* The Quiet Bar: San Diego Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* SF v LA Legal Culture (5-27-26)
* Why Talent Travels Poorly Between San Francisco and Los Angeles (5-27-26)
* San Francisco and Los Angeles as Rival Models of Urban Access (5-27-26)
* Social Cliques in New York, 2026 (5-25-26)
* Social Cliques in San Francisco, 2026 (5-25-26)
* The Rival Courts of Washington (5-25-26)
* The City of Private Rooms (5-25-26)
Category Archives: Chabad
Looking for Lost Jews
The campervan runs north on the Stuart Highway with a six-foot menorah strapped to the roof and two toddlers asleep in the back. Outside the window the plain goes red to the horizon. The man at the wheel wears a … Continue reading
Raisin Heir Arrested for Harassing Jews in the Pacific Palisades
The home on Sunset Boulevard sold in March for $5.3 million. Bruce Lion, sixty-four, an heir to a Fresno raisin company, bought the house that shares a property line with the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Pacific Palisades. Within weeks … Continue reading
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The Corner of the Field
A boy named Hillel lived around the corner from the Rav-Noy home. This was the 1970s, and Hillel had Down syndrome. He talked different and he looked different, and the neighborhood and the era kept such children where they kept … Continue reading
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The Two Monuments of Yorba Linda
The Chabad campus Rabbi David (Dovid) Eliezrie (b. 1951) built sits a mile and a half from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Nixon (1913-1994) lies buried there, beside the small frame house where he was born, under a slab of … Continue reading
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The Hero System of Rabbi Mendel Kalmenson
A girl of fourteen sits in Crown Heights with a problem. The year is sometime in the 1950s. A new school has opened, advanced, untested, and the administration wants her in the first class. She does not want to go. … Continue reading
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The Hero System of Rabbi Baruch Shlomo Eliyahu Cunin
In 1958 a yeshiva boy of eighteen stood in line at 770 Eastern Parkway to receive a piece of matzah from the Rebbe before going home to his parents near Yankee Stadium for the Seder. The Rebbe handed him a … Continue reading
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The Judge Who Vanishes
The questions come by phone and by fax. A man in Memphis wants to know whether the chicken his wife salted is fit to eat. A widow in Los Angeles wants to know whether she may remarry, and when. A … Continue reading
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The Hero System of Rabbi Chaim Mentz
Late on a Sunday night the rabbi sits alone at the microphone in a Koreatown studio, white shirt, black slacks, the fringes of his tzitzit hanging loose, and he tells Los Angeles he has the answers if the city has … Continue reading
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The Simon Jacobson Voice
Simon Jacobson (b. 1956) built his public voice on a single move. He speaks as a translator. For more than a decade he led the team that memorized and transcribed the talks of his teacher, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), and … Continue reading
The Yosef Yitzchak Jacobson Voice
Jacobson (b. 1972) learned to speak by reproducing another man’s speech. From age fifteen he served as a choizer, one of the young men who sat through the Rebbe’s farbrengens and then rebuilt the talks from memory, word for word, … Continue reading
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