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A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

Redford fights Rather’s good fight

BY ERIC MINKPublished November 4, 2015

“He didn’t try to do a caricature or an impression,” Dan Rather told me. “He just tried to capture some of the essence of the person.”Rather was sharing his thoughts about Robert Redford’s performance in the role of Dan Rather in the movie...

"Go Set a Watchman" by Harper Lee

When work of art becomes something more

BY ERIC MINKPublished July 29, 2015

Given the conflicting, contradictory stories swirling around the release of “Go Set a Watchman” by HarperCollins Publishers two weeks ago, it’s impossible to know what to believe.So I’ve distilled the situation down to the two possibilities that...

Eric Mink

Love – on however many legs

BY ERIC MINKPublished July 1, 2015

I saw Luna take off, but I didn’t see her land a fraction of a second later. I didn’t need to; I heard the scream that came from her when she hit the hardwood floor.She scrambled away somehow, and I ran after her, hoping she was more scared than hurt....

Eric Mink

Fraternity’s racist chant resonates far beyond campus

BY ERIC MINKPublished April 1, 2015

Last Friday, David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma, released the results of a three-week investigation into the use of a racist chant by members of the university’s chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity.They sang the chant...

Eric Mink

Defending Brian Williams – to a point

BY ERIC MINKPublished March 4, 2015

There’s no question that “NBC Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams “misrepresented events which occurred while he was covering the Iraq War in 2003,” as NBC News President Deborah Turness put it in a Feb. 10 memo to her staff. Williams had acknowledged...

Bradley Cooper stars as Chris Kyle in 'American Sniper.'

Let’s not mistake movies for real life

BY ERIC MINKPublished February 4, 2015

The Chris Kyle I know doesn’t actually exist.He’s an imaginary construct, a dramatic fabrication by screenwriter Jason Hall and director Clint Eastwood for their movie “America Sniper.” It is loosely based on “American Sniper,” a 2012 autobiography...

Eric Mink

Looking for the future of Ferguson

By Eric MinkPublished December 3, 2014

What matters now?It’s been four months since the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, by Darren Wilson, 28, a white police officer, after a 90-second daytime encounter in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.Since then, there...

Hope's exterior

Life and death in Hope: The true value of memory

By Eric MinkPublished November 5, 2014

It’s 8 in the morning on Oct. 11, and I’m standing under a drizzly gray sky on a sprawling muddy lawn behind a rock-solid limestone building in the middle of nowhere. Everything feels wrong.This place – the limestone structure and several outbuildings;...

Illustration by Mary Engelbreit. Copyright 2014, All Rights Reserved. Used with permission of the artist.

Preventing future Fergusons starts with recognizing our humanity

BY ERIC MINKPublished September 3, 2014

Last Thursday (Aug. 28), about an hour and half into a two-hour public gathering at Wellspring Church in Ferguson, a young African-American woman named Johnetta Elzie took the microphone and spoke with a clear, fearless voice.“I came down because I...

Eric Mink is a freelance writer and editor and teaches film studies at Webster University. He is a former columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Daily News in New York. His column appears in the Jewish Light on the first Wednesday of every month. You can contact him at ericmink1@gmail.com.

Bad news deluge

By Eric MinkPublished August 6, 2014

It feels as though we’ve been drowning in terrible news all summer, and every day seems to bring more waves crashing down on our hapless heads. Some people I know — people who pride themselves on being well-informed — have told me they’ve become...

Eric Mink

Web TV binge- watching comes at cost of communal buzz

By ERIC MINKPublished July 2, 2014

Forgive me, for I have binged.I have used the two Internet-based video services to which I subscribe — Netflix and Amazon Instant Video — to watch multiple episodes of a TV series in one sitting.Thus have I watched “The Americans,” “Call the...

Eric Mink is a freelance writer and editor and teaches film studies at Webster University. He is a former columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Daily News in New York. Contact him at ericmink1@gmail.com. 

In ‘net neutrality,’ FCC is anything but neutral

By Eric MinkPublished May 7, 2014

Next week, the Federal Commu-nications Commission plans to propose new rules that its chairman claims will preserve the Internet as a free, fair and open communications medium for all.It seems far more likely that the rules will radically distort the...

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