Watching Republicans not react to The Plane made for two or three minutes of interesting television last spring. Mostly they skittered away from the cameras, like bugs suddenly revealed by a bright kitchen light. It was akin to those scenes in a New York apartment. You open the cupboard in the middle of the night and see the roaches beat it for the crevices. No matter the shape and size of the scandal, Republicans have lost the will to break with Voldemort.

I was was born in the Fifties between the founding of Israel and the Six Day War in 1967. That puts me in the sweet spot for old-school Zionism: the flags, the hero worship, the uniforms, the folk dancing.

I’ve confessed elsewhere that I know all the songs, especially the anthems of self-defense. The soundtrack of my youth is not “Meet the Beatles,” but “Hey Daroma le-Eilat.” That’s a salute to the beauties of the Land of Israel, fueled by the thought of territorial expansion. I come from a Labor Zionist family and my grandmother’s brother was a Zionist pioneer. Many of my relatives worked for the State of Israel. For American Jews, we were the real thing.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

Ha’aretz, Israel’s newspaper of record, just published an article about rabbinic migration. Israeli rabbis, born in the country, are leaving Israel for other destinations. Most are coming to North America to work in synagogues like the ones where I have served. But the whole Jewish world seems to be benefitting from this phenomenon. There are Israeli rabbis in Australia and South America. Several serve congregations all over Europe. Eventually I’m sure we will see one in Tulsa.

Would Joe Biden be president if it were not for Hunter?

Something tells me that’s not the case. No one who saw the fatal debate could possibly believe that he had a chance. In the longish history of televised politics, Biden’s performance was uniquely awful. “Meandering” doesn’t do it justice. You have to add stumbling, gnarled, and incoherent. It wasn’t a matter of graceless language. The problem is that there was no language to speak of.

So many people piss me off, I should probably live in solitary confinement.

This time around, it’s Yotam Ottolenghi, celebrity chef, culinary thought leader, and Jewish guy from Jerusalem and London. For a while in the first and second year of COVID, everyone I knew was cooking from his recipes. Bored and fretful, we bought all the books, beautiful affairs stuffed with words and pictures that made it seem like life was still worth living. I remember thinking a lot about the covers, weirdly padded so that they squished like pillows. Each one seemed like its own puffy taco.

Ready to hate my guts? Again?

You may recall that my hobby horse of choice is Barak Obama, my erstwhile hero. Apart from the fact that he deported millions of brown people, he was a passing fair president with whom I felt closely aligned. He was a graceful writer, a thoughtful orator, and ran an administration entirely free of scandal. Even the thought that he would end up on a client list—let alone an Epstein client list—is a crazy fantasy beyond imagining. Barak Obama was clean as a whistle. Trump is unfit to shine his shoes.

I made a promise to myself last spring that I would celebrate Firgun Day (fear-goon; accent on the second syllable) at the appropriate time. That day has come: July 17, and I am working to acknowledge the good people in my world. The key to the celebration is clean hands and a pure heart. Invented by Israelis and rooted in the Yiddish word for joy, the day is supposed to be overflowing with compliments and admiration, and entirely free of envy or ambivalence. For me, it’s a way of listing human blessings: people who have touched my mind and heart and contributed to the goodness of life on earth. Living or dead, it doesn’t matter to me. I love and respect them with all my heart.

Hegseth’s Pentagon is on the way down, and not even God will be able to save it.

Like so many offenses of the current administration, Peter Hegseth’s PrayerFest slipped quickly out of sight. It was there for a moment at the end of May and was swamped almost immediately by other developments. When a venal regime commits wrongdoing almost daily, it’s hard to keep anything in focus.

The administration has us right where it wants us.

You may be horrified by the footage of ICE apprehensions, their evident brutality, the grotesque use of force, but Stephen Miller wants to accustom us to the look of savagery. He figures that a few more rounds of Kristallnacht-style glass breaking will soften us up for the still-worse-to-come. That’s standard operations for fascist regimes. You have to prepare a populace for ultimate force by testing the limits with sub-ultimate force.

“Let It Be Morning” is the saddest film I have ever seen. Only one person dies, one person is wounded, and no child is harmed in the making of this movie. It is still an essay in soul-sickness and despair.

One of the best things that’s happened since I stepped down from our synagogue is that I can now say pretty much what I want. I have always sharply criticized politicians and offered shrill opinions on the issues of the day. But the rules prevented me from advocating for candidates. If we gave a platform to somebody running for office, we had to do the same for his or her opponent. It made for a blander political program than I would have liked.

Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it certainly dulls our capacity for surprise. I have seen “Starry Nights” a thousand times—in person, in print, on posters and screens.

Surely you remember Chef Justice John Roberts. He was the one who taught us about stare decisis. That’s the doctrine that protects us against spasm. It means that the law itself deserves deference and humility, that it is not, at heart, a revolutionary enterprise, but needs to be shielded against sudden upset.

Our dog Keisha died this week. It happened in a cozy dog bed in Tahlequah, where she nested with her longtime sitter, Stephen. Keisha stayed with Stephen every time we traveled. The truth is that she loved him best. When he came to the door, she made happy circles and went to his truck without a backward glance. He had a gift for observing her need for space and moving toward her when she felt the need to be touched. I think that she also liked the sound his voice, which has the reedy buzz and range of an oboe.

One of the most important moments in last summer’s campaign was a single utterance by Kamala Harris. I can usually recall a strike of lightning, but I can’t remember whether it was at the convention or the debate. Coulda been one. Coulda been the other.

In the American imagination, all Jews are New Yorkers. That’s especially true about the codes of anti-Semitism. New Yorkers are brash, loud, and disrespectful. They presume intimacy and take up too much space. They’re clever, but conniving and breathe through their mouths. It’s a way of talking about Jews without saying the word

A new subscriber recently wrote to ask what I really want from the Democratic Party. Fair question, for sure, and I’m glad to try again.

What I originally wrote was hardly enough. I said that I was waiting for “a vision that was grand and transporting. A message about restoring dignity to labor, embracing difference, and finding national purpose. It also has to be tough and grounded.”

If you look hard enough in the great pile of his presidency, there might be something that you find attractive about Trump. For me it has been an aversion to warmaking. It’s not exactly a form of pacificism. Trump’s natural default is bellicose threats, a promise to deploy his considerable bulk to crush whatever opposition he encounters.

What’s the deal with Donald Trump and immigrants? On Mondays and Wednesday he wants to deport them all. It was the first thing he said to the American People: every immigrant without legal credentials is either a rapist, a murderer, or criminally insane. He promised to deport at least a million by December. His minions immediately fell to the floor, licked his boots, and got to work. For Steven Miller, it was a gift from God: all that pain with an imminent deadline!

My family is nothing if not brutally honest. “Don’t get us wrong, Dad. We love the blog, but we think that you may be flooding the zone. People have other things to do. They have to mow the lawn and get their colonoscopies. They don’t have time for five posts a week.”