“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”  — Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan As you have probably heard, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson is off the air. In my judgment, Carlson and his former colleagues...

Exactly 23 years ago on Mother’s Day, I marched in the Million Mom March alongside numerous Jewish organizations in Washington, D.C. after my first-grade daughter went on national television talking about her fear of guns in her school.  Nothing...

You’ve seen the photograph.  Three Israeli paratroopers, their eyes glistening with tears, gaze up at the ancient stones of the Western Wall in awe and wonder.  Jerusalem is ours! On June 5, 1967, with enemy tanks massed on Israel’s borders and...

I signed up months ago to write this week’s d’var Torah. I remember thinking what a fun parasha this would be to share with you all. I love the discussion of the jubilee year and of the gifts made to the sanctuary, and of the idealism that closes...

Troubling history  The online article published April 3 about Holocaust rescuer Varian Fry (“New Netflix show ‘Transatlantic’ chronicles an effort to save artists and thinkers from Nazis,” by PJ Grisar of the Forward, reprinted with permission...

A recent New York Times feature about a troubled World War II veteran has inadvertently shed fresh light on the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz. The story also implicitly undermines one of the major themes...

Isn’t it interesting how buzz words become popular? Somehow someone somewhere coins a catch phrase, blabs it to everyone who owns ears, and then it gets repeated over and over until it becomes part of regular conversation. Often people use these...

Viewpoints expressed in letters, commentaries, cartoons and other opinion pieces reflect those of the writer or artist and not those of the Light.  For the past few weeks, we have watched with anxiety as American healthcare takes a backseat to...

Sometimes you have leftover food in the fridge for too long and you have to clean it out. Or the photo roll on your smartphone is jam-packed so you have to remove a few pics.  In the same way, my brain is filled with all kinds of random thoughts, so...

“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,” wrote Robert Browning in his poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” imagining the wisdom of a real 12th century scholar counseling us to recognize the challenges of youth and the possibility of true maturity and...

We marked Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Memorial Day, on April 17-18. I don’t remember the details of the story, but I do remember some of the names. He was a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. We met him on sabbatical to Israel, mid-’90s. I was studying music...

When I was a financial planner, we helped individuals and families address their sequential financial needs and priorities at each stage of their lifecycle.  There are three major stages of one’s financial lifecycle: 1) Learning years –birth to-age...