A Prayer for the New Year

Sometimes love arrives ahead of you, in spite of you. Cooking slowly became a way of being there for the people I love. A wordless language that says: I see you. I hear you. You’re worth the onion-chopping.

If an experienced professional with rare expertise leaves Israel, the impact cannot be understood simply by adding another person to a brain-drain statistic. The more relevant question is how many people with comparable experience remain, how essential that expertise is and how easily it can be rebuilt.

Conspiracy theories and antisemitism do have an affinity and important features in common, including the tendency to frame accusations in such a way that refutation does not affect the accuser. Having suffered from this for centuries, do we really want it in our public life?

Any Democrat seeking to lead the party in 2028 should embrace the politics of addition by subtraction and reject any movement seeking to end all aid to Israel and replace America’s constitutional order.

If renewed exclusion teaches us only to become more protective of Jewish work, we will have learned the wrong lesson from the original Borscht Belt.