Groundbreaking of Agudas Achim Congregation in 1956 at its current location in Alexandria. Courtesy Agudas Achim Before Susan and Shawn Dilles moved to the Washington area in the 1980s, a relative gave them a piece of advice. “Jews don’t go to Virginia.” After all, conventional wisdom was that the institutions, services and conveniences of Jewish life were centered in the growing suburbs of Montgomery County, in Maryland. For Jews, Northern Virginia was terra incognita. Forty years later, they’re thankful they ignored that piece of advice. Any remaining doubts that Northern Virginia is a good ..read more

Emily Tamkin (Courtesy of Tamkin) Review “Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities” by Emily Tamkin. New York: HarperCollins, 2022. 256 pages | $28.99. In her introduction, author Emily Tamkin writes that she wasn’t sure she should write this book because of her shaky Jewish background — she didn’t go to Hebrew school, learn Hebrew or become bat mitzvah, and she is married to a non-Jew. Yes, she may not have been an expert on Judaism and the American Jewish community — at least when she began this project. But she did her homework and her take on the material is often fr ..read more

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) takes the stage to talk about his book, which documents the Trump impeachment, the Jan. 6 insurrection and the death of Raskin’s son. Screenshot. As lead impeachment manager, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) headed the effort to convict President Donald Trump in his second Senate trial. That 2021 impeachment, like the first a year earlier, ended in an acquittal. Was it a total failure, though? Raskin argued no to an Alexandria audience last weekend. “I call it the greatest case of jury nullification in history,” Raskin said. “I was crestfallen. But I’ve come to believe it’s ..read more

Nina Totenberg at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., May 21, 2019. (photo by Allison Shelley) REVIEW “Dinners With Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships” by Nina Totenberg. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022. 304 pages $27.99. If kindness and thoughtfulness are true measures of our lives, then Nina Totenberg, the iconic legal affairs correspondent for NPR, long ago would have earned the title “St. Nina.” One scene from this memoir illustrating the depth of her compassion — and which will be part of my memory bank for a long time — dealt with one of her good friends on the Supreme Cou ..read more

Eddie Antar, right, once known as “Crazy Eddie,” New York’s electronics king, is led by an Israeli police detective in Petach Tikvah, Israel, June 25, 1992. Photo by Sven Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images By Stephen Silver | JTA Crazy Eddie was a consumer electronics empire built on hype. Entrepreneur Eddie Antar grew his chain of discounts stores in the New York of the 1970s with unforgettably loud TV commercials, a reputation for low prices and a compelling story about an underdog family of Syrian Jews who had fled persecution and built a successful business. It was also, alas, a business buil ..read more

Saul Golubcow. Courtesy of Saul Golubcow. As a student at Rutgers, Saul Golubcow wrote for a literary magazine. An English professor saw something in the young man’s work and urged him to pursue the life of a professional writer. But first, the professor told him, find work as a bartender. That’s the best way to learn about people. Golubcow didn’t feel he was ready for that, however. Instead he focused his life on his marriage to Professor Hedy Teglasi, their children, Jeremy and Jordan, the mortgage and his work as a project director for a health insurance company. But two or three years ago ..read more

Review “When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture” by Elana Sztokman. lionessbooks.com. 442 pages $36.99. This book lifts the curtain on an all-too familiar horror show. The predator with the power — sometimes political, at other times economic, in the case of rabbis, often spiritual and/or charismatic — forces himself or herself on the the victim without the person’s consent.   The abuse can be sexual, physical or verbal; the abusers are usually male, but a few female predators also make their marks. Victims include adults and children ..read more

Review “Hands of Gold: One Man’s Quest to Find the Silver Lining in Misfortune” by Roni Robbins. Oegstgeest, Netherlands: Amsterdam Publishers, 2022. 230 pages. $19.95. Sam Fox was heroic in his ordinariness. The protagonist in this novel — like the toy punching bags that always pop back up after being pushed down — was super resilient. No matter the challenge, he seemed up to it. In some ways, Sam, whose story apparently is loosely based on that of author’s grandfather, personifies 20th-century, Eastern-European-Jewish immigration to the United States. Shimshon Tzvi Fox — “Sam” in America ..read more

Israeli novelist Abraham B. Yehoshua speaks after receiving the honorary doctorate degree in philosophical and historical sciences from magnificent rector Fabrizio Micari of the University of Palermo on 10 September 2019 in Palermo, Italy. (Photo by Francesco Militello Mirto/NurPhoto) A.B. Yehoshua the novelist took a sharp knife to his fellow citizens’ pretensions and delusions, writing books that laid Israel bare like an open bleeding wound. But A.B. Yehoshua the soothsayer sought to heal wounds, reconciling Israelis with Palestinians, with the Jewish Diaspora and above all with themselves ..read more

Meyer Lansky, bottom right, lent his services to Jewish leaders looking to counter the American Nazi movement. (Getty Images via JTA) By Howard Lovy The way author Michael Benson tells it, one day in 1938, New York judge and Jewish communal leader Nathan Perlman sat at a bar and thought, “How come these Nazis get to march down 86th Street, goose-stepping and ‘sieg heiling’ like it’s the Macy’s Parade? Why are they so brazen?” It was because they were not worried about the consequences. Too few people in then-isolationist America really cared about what was being said about the Jews or what was ..read more