Anniversaries come and go, but before last fall recedes forever, I hope that you’ll make a mental note. At the risk of sounding full-bore ethnocentric, last year was the three-hundred-seventieth anniversary of Jewish settlement in North America. On September 7, 1654, twenty-three Jews landed in New Amsterdam after being expelled from Recife, Brazil.

They were probably heading back to Europe, but their ship was blown off course as it headed north. Trouble enough, not to mention the pirates of the Caribbean.

The repatriation of stolen art is never a sidebar issue. It raises critical issues about what the world community will tolerate, along with the workings of atonement long after the fact.

The latest notable case involves a canvas by Pissaro, born into a Jewish family on the island of St. Thomas in what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Adam Schiff, the new senator from California, always has my attention. Enormously well spoken, with simpatico politics, he’s the kind of person who rings many of my bells.

But it was a recent decision that really sealed the deal. As many of you have read, he took his senatorial oath of office on a twelfth-century edition of the Mishneh Torah. That would be the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides, one of the first post-Biblical codes of law in Jewish history.