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This category contains 13 posts

In Prague, A 35th Birthday Celebrated


I wound up in Prague, a family town, for my 35th birthday. Continue reading

Down South In New Orleans


I was in New Orleans for Digiday’s Programmatic Summit. But when the panel discussions were over and the networking moved from the formal setting of the Ritz-Carlton to the informal backdrop of the Crescent City, I got to explore a slice of the city beyond the tourist trap of Bourbon Street. Continue reading

Picture Perfect


Pictures and the powerful sense of awe. Continue reading

On Voluntary and Involuntary Fasting


On Yom Kippur, Jews around the world fast for 25 hours. On any given day, hundreds of millions around the world go with out food.
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Florence


We landed in Florence in the early afternoon, after a relatively painless six-plus-hour flight across the Atlantic, with a layover in Amsterdam. Upon reaching our hotel, Hotel Rosso 23, nestled in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, we debated for a whole three-minutes if we should walk around the city or take a nap and hope we didn’t sleep through the day. We walked. Of course…
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Italia!


Tomorrow I leave for Italy. We fly into Florence and I’m very excited to see the birthplace of the Renaissance. After a couple of days in the city, we head out to some small towns in Tuscany for a few days. We then will head south to Rome, where I’ve already bought my tickets for … Continue reading

Thoughts on Immigration


One of the great things about America is that just about everyone, at some point in their familial line, has an amazing and compelling immigration story. We often forget this, as we spit venom towards those who cross our borders, a tactic that has been replayed again and again over the generations.
We’re a nation of nomads, of frontiersmen and women, of expansionists.
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Nine Years


Nine years. 3,285 days. Man, time flies. One of the things that make us, well, us is our capacity to communicate complex ideas (another awesome human characteristic is our opposable thumb, but that’s for another day). We are story tellers and each generation has their story to tell, typically marked by an Earth-shattering experience.
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The WTC Mosque


So imagine this scenario:
You just finished reading your big book of answers when you hear a knock at the door. You think to yourself, well, it can’t be Trouble because there was a knock. Trouble enters without letting you know. You walk to the door where you find three close friends. You let them in, but they seem different. There’s a look of fear, and a look of sadness in their eyes. This is when you realized Trouble can come into your home, invited, masked as Friendship. Your friends see your big book of answers sitting on the table and they tell you, “We’re sorry, but you have to come with us.” You’ve heard stories, you know what happens next, so you say, “Let me tell my kids I love them.” Your friends, the ones who have aligned themselves with Trouble in order to protect their families, lead you out of your house, as they take your big book of answers with them to be tossed aside, burned and destroyed.
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Learning How To Use Sunblock


I am not what you’d call a beach person. When I was younger, I would go to Jones Beach (Field 6) with my dad, but when we moved to NJ, I just stopped going. Maybe it was because the water was usually gross; maybe it was I hated the sand in my bathing suit; or maybe it was because I never tanned, just burned (my Eastern Eurpoean genes are working hard this week).
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What’s a Jew?


This week brought two interesting aspects of what it means to be a Jew to the world. The first, which actually started in January but didn’t get much notice until recently, has been seen as both a triumph of spirit and a desecration of memory. The second has the ability to eradicate what it means to be a Jew.
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The Fate of US Soccer?


With the World Cup now complete (and apparently determined by a cephalopod mollusk), the question many in the US are asking is: will the success of the American team yield positive results for MLS (or even American soccer in general)?
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Messages From Haiti: Behind the Scenes of the Disaster


This post originally ran on Mediaite and The Huffington Post
Each generation has its history-changing, world-altering moment. Over the past decade, my generation has been faced with some pretty heavy moments. September 11th. Hurricane Katrina. The Tsunami. And now, Haiti. If actions define who we are as individuals, then our collective responses to these moments are what define generations. Now is the moment for us to respond and help those who have fallen rise from tragedy.
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