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Sept. 8, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : How far must one go to help somebody out of a contract?
Barry Rubin: Waiting For Something
Sept. 5, 2008
Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: What does 'doing the right thing' entail?
Caroline B. Glick:
The master strategist
Sept. 4, 2008
Ron Kampeas: Biden, Palin take lead in clash on Mideast issues
Bruce Dancis: With humor as their weapon, the Three Stooges took on Hitler
Sept. 3, 2008
Rabbi S. Binyomin Ginsberg: Productive school years don't just happen
The Kosher Gourmet
by Linda Gassenheimer: Quick lamb stew serves up flavors of India
Sept. 2, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Costly Advice
Caroline B. Glick: Calling Israel's bluff
JWisdom: Wandering in Wonder by Rabbi Mordechai Becher
August 29, 2008
Rabbi Berel Wein: 20/20 sightlessness
Caroline B. Glick: When history is not repeated
JWisdom: Blessed or Cursed: It's Really Up to You by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky
August 28, 2008
Steve Lipman: A Comeback for the 'Jewish Jordan'
Jeffrey Weiss: Researcher reports 'intriguing' diabetes breakthrough
August 27, 2008
Rabbi Zecharya Greenwald: Removing the perfectionist's mask
The Kosher Gourmet
by Emily Nunn: Summer harvest linguine
JWisdom:: The Missing Link in Spiritual Life by Rabbi David Aaron
August 26, 2008
Yaffa Ganz: Grandma gets lessons in staying cool
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: The Dems' 'soft' jihadist
JWisdom::
Today: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Plague of indifference
August 25, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: A friend is bearing a silly grudge from a supposed wrong. What recourse do I have?
Daniel Pipes: Barack Obama through Muslim Eyes
JWisdom:: The knowledge you need to overcome your insecurities by Malka Schulman
August 22, 2008
Rabbi Berel Wein: Life's essential ingredient
Caroline B. Glick: Dominos anyone?
JWisdom:: Actually, Do Sweat the Small Stuff! by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky
August 21, 2008
Today in Biblical History
by Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Popularization of Kabbalah: 20 Menachem-Av 1558 CE
Jonathan Rosenblum: Lessons from the Beyond
JWisdom: : The Olympian within is rooting for you -- yes, you! –- to go for the gold
August 20, 2008
Jonathan Tobin: Misleading Platform Platitudes
The Kosher Gourmet
by Linda Gassenheimer: Chicken Salad with Asian Dressing
JWisdom: The Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith: America's Defense of the Jews --- Until WWII by Rabbi Nosson Scherman
August 19, 2008
Dennis Prager: If the Almighty doesn't exist
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Obama's Islamist problem has nothing to do with his upbringing
JWisdom:
Think your life is messed up? by Rabbi David Aaron
August 18, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Business with Friends
Diana West: Roars About Russia, Bare Whispers About Islam
JWisdom: Relationship agony: The real cause by Malka Schulman
August 15, 2008
Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: To love the Divine
Caroline B. Glick: Georgia, Israel, and the nature of man
JWisdom: The Truly Righteous Don't Demand Entitlements by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky
August 14, 2008
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Confessions of broken spirit
Libby Lazewnik: The Numbers Game
JWisdom: Six Questions You'll Be Asked in Heaven? - Uh - Let's Just Take One for Now! by Gavriel Aryeh Sanders
August 13, 2008
Jonathan Tobin: Georgia should be on their minds
The Kosher Gourmet
by Linda Gassenheimer: Go Greek: Pair flavorful lamb kebabs with a hearty salad
JWisdom: Human hybrids aren't science fiction by Rabbi David Aaron
August 12, 2008
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Bless us
Daniel Pipes: The West's Islamist Infiltrators
JWisdom: From Sadness to Gladness: The Route from Tisha b'Av to Rosh Hashana by Rabbi Mordechai Becher
August 11, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist
by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: A Jewish view on fair pricing
Caroline B. Glick: Ignoring failure in Gaza
JWisdom: 'Communication' Is Not The Answer! by Malka Schulman
August 7, 2008
Rabbi David Gutterman: A Continuing Story With a Sustaining Goal
Rabbi Berel Wein: Mourning and morning
JWisdom: Yes, we are still in exile by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky
August 6, 2008
David Ashenfelter: Government made military engineer's life a living hell because of his faith, Defense Department report documents
Jonathan Tobin: Speak the Truth; Defeat the Lies
JWisdom: Jewish Spirituality: Fusion or Confusion? by Rabbi David Aaron
August 5, 2008
Chris Leppek: Church/state wall beginning to crumble?
Paul Greenberg: Exit Olmert (no encore, please)
JWisdom: Serenity: Make the commitment by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin (Read by Gavriel Sanders)
August 4, 2008
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Am I taking advantage of another's psychological quirk?
Andrew Silow-Carroll: A black and a Jew walk into the White House…
JWisdom: The Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith: Edward R. Morrow visits the ‘living dead’ by Rabbi Nosson Scherman
March 22, 2007
J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)
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Jewish World Review
Jan. 15, 2007
/ 25 Teves, 5767
Pelosi a rare example of a woman who “has it all”
By
Mark Steyn
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I don't know where they stand on apple pie, but the Democrats have come out for motherhood in a big way. In fact, who needs apple pie when you've got the extra-sugary content of the Washington Post? Last Wednesday, the capital's newspaper of record (now available in print, online and in granulated form) published a column headlined ''Grandma With A Gavel.''
Can you guess which grandma it was, boys and girls? Yes, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has single-handedly, as she put it, ''shattered the marble ceiling.'' And she's right: From CNN to the New York Times, the entire press corps has lost its marbles. Grandma Smith Goes to Washington is the hit of the planet. At a time when most grandmothers are reduced to eating dog food because the Bush administration refuses to let them bulk-order prescription drugs from Saskatchewan or, even more horrifying, reduced to watching Robert Goulet in dinner theater night after night in Florida, Gran'ma Pelosi has single-handedly shattered the dinner-theater ceiling and/or dog-kennel ceiling. ''Grandma With A Gavel'' was written by hard-headed reporter Ruth Marcus, scourge of Republican Justice Departments for many years, and this column reflected her notoriously sharp forensic skills:
''The images as California Democrat Nancy Pelosi took office last week were striking and stirring in their unfamiliarity. Pelosi, holding her infant grandson swaddled in a white receiving blanket, as she sat in the well of the House, awaiting her election. Pelosi, with the assurance of a mother experienced at dispensing cookies to impatient toddlers, giving each child his and her turn with the gavel. Pelosi raising her hand to take the oath as her grandson, at her side, fiddled with grandma's papers.''
Golly. One only hopes the wee ones understand that, post-coronation, Queen Nancy's ascension to the throne might cut into all this quality time. "Gran'ma Got Run Over By Her Reign, Dears,'' as the old song so shrewdly warns. But don't Republicans have families, too? Yes, but let's face it, they creep you out, don't they? If you have the misfortune to be nominated by the Bush administration, your kids get headlines like ''An Image A Little Too Carefully Coordinated.'' That was the Washington Post's Style Section on Chief Justice John Roberts' moppets: They didn't care for ''the 1950s-style tableaux vivant,'' or the ''freshly scrubbed and adorable'' look from ''a Currier & Ives landscape''; they sniffed at the ''seersucker suit with short pants'' of ''towheaded Jack'' and his sister's ''blond pageboy''; they didn't even like the name ''Jack.''
But these Pelosi kids are in a whole other league. You have to pity those losers in Hollywood: Instead of wasting their time with that lousy Geena Davis ''Commander in Chief'' strong-career-woman thing, why didn't they do ''The Pelosi Bunch''?
''Here's the story of a lovely lady
Who was raising 30 grandkids on her own
All of them had hair of black like their gran'ma
And swaddling cloths hand-sewn.''
''Here's the story of a man named Hastert
Who was never photographed with any kids
'Cept in stories on Mark Foley's pages
And so he hit the skids . . . ''
Oh, come on. OK, Dennis Hastert doesn't bake cookies, but I can't be the only one who thinks he's a little like that cute Cookie Bear on ''The Andy Williams Show.''
I am? Oh, well.
''Having five children in six years is the best training in the world for Speaker of the House,'' Speaker Grandma said. ''It made me the ultimate multitasker and the master of focus, routine and scheduling.''
''How different is this?'' cooed Ruth Marcus. ''Imagine Margaret Thatcher threatening to deploy her 'mother-of-five voice.' ''
Boy, did Thatcher get it wrong! That old Iron Lady shtick, talking about communism, and inflation, and boring old ''issues,'' when eve feminist reporter in town was dying to hear her favorite cookie recipes.
Alas, not every Democrat has got the lioness-with-cubs routine down quite so pat. On Thursday, Sen. Barbara Boxer advanced the notion that Condoleezza Rice can't understand ''the price of war'' because she's childless. ''You're not going to pay a particular price,'' she told the secretary of state, ''with an immediate family.'' In other words, her childlessness means she will never have to experience any personal loss for the decisions she makes. ''You can't begin to imagine how you celebrate any holiday or birthday,'' Boxer continued, accusingly.
Hmm. What I can't begin to imagine is a Republican senator getting away with hammering, say, Gloria Steinem for her childlessness. But, after 12 years in the barren wilderness, the left is overjoyed at the Fecund Coming. Over at Ms. magazine, I expect they're rolling their eyes while admiring the cynicism. But the internal contradictions of the new Democrats are striking. At the ''Women's Tea'' inaugural festivities, the Dems played, inevitably, ''I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar,'' and the new speaker saluted the late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro honored Gov. Richards' daughter Cecile, who's now the president of Planned Parenthood.
I would wager that, when the young Nancy Pelosi had ''five children in six years,'' a hefty percentage of that parenthood wasn't planned. She is, in that sense, philosophically at odds with her party and, indeed, with her congressional district. San Francisco now registers more dogs that it does schoolchildren. Lest you think I'm being my usual homophobic self, I hasten to add that for once I'm not: It speaks well for the Bay Area that they had to embrace the gay life to match the collapsed birth rates European cities have managed to achieve heterosexually. Nonetheless, at a time when fertility rates call into question the survival of Russia, Japan, Germany, Spain and Italy, the new speaker certainly presents an unusual model: She appears to be a rare example of a woman who truly ''has it all.'' She had five kids and then became the first female speaker in human history, an event (according to the media) women have been waiting for since Caveman Ug said, ''Hi, honey, I'm home!'' and clubbed the missus over the head for being late with the saber-toothed meatloaf. It's certainly not the career path feminist orthodoxy has commended these last 30 years, but it seems to have brought Pelosi happiness, and at a time of greater life expectancy it has a certain logic: Have kids in your 20s, go into politics in your 40s, serve as two-term president in your 60s. You can have it all!
I think the GOP should give up trying to demonize Nancy Pelosi. The Botox gags and bug-eyed photos won't work. Tonally, she seems very normal, in ways that, for example, certain presidentially inclined New York senators can never quite manage. But Pelosi's fellow California liberals and those gushing feminist columnists ought to ponder why ''the most powerful woman in America'' is quite so untypical: What does it say when it's the exception that proves the ruler?
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STEYN'S LATEST
"America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It"
It's the end of the world as we know it…
Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are.
And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.
If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steynthe most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking worldshows to devastating effect in this, his first and eagerly awaited new book on American and global politics.
The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the Westwedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivionis looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization.
Europe, laments Steyn, is almost certainly a goner. The future, if the West has one, belongs to America alonewith maybe its cousins in brave Australia. But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world's last best hope.
Steyn argues that, contra the liberal cultural relativists, America should proclaim the obvious: we do have a better government, religion, and culture than our enemies, and we should spread America's influence around the worldfor our own sake as well as theirs.
Mark Steyn's America Alone is laugh-out-loud funnybut it will also change the way you look at the world. It is sure to be the most talked-about book of the year.
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JWR contributor Mark Steyn is North American Editor of The (London) Spectator. Comment by clicking here.
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