Big news: "You may have recently received a message indicating that your University of Chicago account and access to certain services would be discontinued.
We are writing to let you know that this message was sent in error." Teleporting to 2004 and sending a LOT of email.
True enough.
The good news is an impossible article is coming together. The less-good are the 500ish words I need to cut.
Right, I got that something to do with the Soviet Union was not from the 1840s!!
It had never occurred to me to wonder if a pigskin handbag (say) was kosher! I'd have assumed n/a because not being eaten, but a leather-derived product that IS being eaten... so complicated!
Then why no pig gelatin? (Asking theoretically, I will personally eat any marshmallow in any context.)
"Please note: You will no longer be able to send email from your uchicago.edu address." A fascinating email to receive from the school I graduated from in 2005. It had not occurred to me I could be doing this thing!
It's a podcast about Jews and fiction-writing these days.
thecjn.ca/arts-culture...
It is a way of expressing disapproval but also, at times, lately, I am genuinely baffled, yes.
But no, I don't do the decentering thing. I'm not on board.
I welcome any and all point-missing comments from those zero-follower brand-new accounts that spring up solely for the purpose of telling me that Israel is evil.
Do I know what the Israeli government imagines it's doing? I don't even know what the US one does and *I am American* (also, now, Canadian) and my native language is English! This should not even need to be spelled out but
There's this counternarrative (?) that emerges, according to which any warm feelings (or even, *concerned* feelings!) diaspora Jews have towards Israel could only possibly be the result of brainwashing. When there is another, perhaps even more likely, explanation.
The tl;dr of it all is that I don't think that whenever Jews do 'center' Israel it's because some communal entity or power-that-be twisted their arm, let alone out of admiration for its current leadership. I think a lot of it is simply, that's where Jewish civilization largely wound up.
This is not a case for or against decentring Israel, but rather an unpacking of what this is even about, and yeah where I personally fall on this.
thecjn.ca/opinion/shou...
I wrote about Israel-decentering. thecjn.ca/opinion/shou...
Gabrielle Moss writes that Hampshire College, which announced its closure this week, was one of the final bastions of boomer utopian thinking.
If you want to write an op-ed (maybe, eventually, more than one op-ed) for The Canadian Jewish News @thecjn.bsky.social please send them my way! Here's how: thecjn.ca/submissions/
You really prepared to break bread with septum-pierced omnicausers, dudebro edgelords who think the enemy is liberal arts colleges?
The people wishcasting a left-right alliance over hating Jews may be underestimating how much both sides the far-right especially hate other, divergent, groups.
Whoa you sure get blocked a lot on this site when you post stuff like setting fire to synagogues is bad.
sure, sure, not all cartoon avatars
Really striking to watch 2 competing visions of diaspora left Jewish politics side-by-side this week.
On the one hand are the orgs platforming Sarah and Inon — they begin with a sense of mutual grief & shared humanity, they champion the Israeli left, they don’t fixate on labels, but on solutions >
Really good @amandahess.bsky.social essay on Lena Dunham's memoir and cultural meaning
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/m...
No!
What's confusing is that I'm not sure the % of haters who explicitly get that she's Jewish. It's not like with Woody Allen (for multiple reasons) or maybe some don't get that he is either!
