Robin Podolsky

Bangladesh: Is It Time for a Heksher Tzedek On Clothes?

Published on May 1, 2013

Honoring Teachers of Freedom on Pesach

Published on March 31, 2013

Come Meet the Landsmen (and Women)!

Published on March 7, 2013

Really, Grey’s Anatomy?

Published on February 6, 2013

“Be Careful With Your Words”

Published on January 27, 2013

Pretty Lights and Paid Time Off Work, What’s Not to Like?  Mostly.

Published on December 24, 2012

The Maccabees Were Not the Taliban.  Or Che Guevara.  Or the Irgun. Let’s Celebrate the Miracle.

Published on December 14, 2012

There Was A Choice?  Then This Is Wrong.

Published on November 15, 2012

On Election Day, I hugged a Republican

Published on November 9, 2012

Jew Prays, Is Arrested

Published on October 19, 2012

The Guilt of the Warmongers

Published on September 16, 2012

It Took Four Days

Published on September 7, 2012

Who’s A Good Pussy?

Published on August 20, 2012

Anglo-Saxon?  And By That You Mean…

Published on July 26, 2012

Erev Rav, Really?

Published on July 20, 2012

Debriefing Auschwitz Part 2: Poland

Published on July 4, 2012

Debriefing Auschwitz: Part 1

Published on July 1, 2012

Birkenau and Krakov: Absolute horror, undeniable hope

Published on June 29, 2012

The graves that aren’t there

Published on June 23, 2012

Thinking Shoah in the 21st Century: The worth of witness

Published on June 18, 2012

Welcome to Erev Rav

Published on June 15, 2012

About

Published on May 15, 2012

Tortured Logic

Published on March 23, 2006

In 1470, five corpses were found in the charnel of a church in Endingen on the Rhine. Eight years earlier, a Jewish man named Elias had sheltered a family of five beggars in his home during the Passover/Easter season. Assuming that Endingen's Jews had murdered the family in order to use their blood for ritual purposes, the governor ordered that Elias and his brothers, Eberlin and Mercklin, be arrested and interrogated.

Response a Disgrace—Not a Tragedy

Published on September 8, 2005

We will be admonished not to make politics out of tragedy, but we have a responsibility to figure out what went wrong with the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Today, far too often, tragedy is employed as an incantation to ward off responsibility. (Try Googling the phrase, "The events of today were tragic, but ..." to get a taste of what I mean.)

Tragedy is an idea we get from the Greeks -- human life as a grand, hopeless struggle against our own flaws and unloving celestial forces that conspire to bring us down. Tragedy is a spectacle, provoking a catharsis composed, in Aristotle's phrase, of "pity and terror" in the spectator -- but not outrage. To call something tragic is to take a stance of elegiac distance. The world view that produced the idea of tragedy also produced great thinkers and artists, but it did not produce prophets.

Sudan—Why We Can’t Give Up on the U.N.

Published on August 5, 2004

The people of Darfur, most of whom are farmers, need to be safe in their own land. They need immediate relief -- food, medicine, shelter -- and the opportunity to rebuild their lives.

Sudan—Why We Can’t Give Up on the U.N.

Published on July 29, 2004

Over 30,000 people have been brutally murdered in the Darfur region of Sudan. At least 120,000 are living in tent camps, now being hammered by rains that turn the dust to mud. Diseases that thrive in the soggy ground continue, along with malnutrition, to drive the body count higher.

History Behind the Cross

Published on June 17, 2004

Once again, Jews are embroiled in a controversy about a cross. A Los Angeles Times article (June 9), about a demonstration in favor of keeping the cross on the L.A. County seal, noted a Jewish presence there and quoted a Jewish demonstrator as saying, "The cross ... reminds us, even as Jews (sic), that religion is free here."