Special to the IJN

Dekel Bar wears a blue-and-white wristband. For Bar, a professional pickleball player with a No. 32 world ranking, the wristband is functional but also sends a message: He is a proud Israeli. “Ever since Oct. 7, I’ve been wearing it,” Bar, 33, said. “It’s my way of showing support wherever I am playing, and a lot of people like that. I get a lot of good comments about it.

As a former newspaper publisher who has covered my share of supposedly transformative elections, I arrived from Jackson, Wyoming in Tel Aviv skeptical that this “historic” election would change anything. Yet here I am, thousands of miles and dollars away, casting my first ballot as an Israeli citizen.

The obituary notice for Mark Howard Levine, 77, of Englewood, Colorado, published in the Intermountain Jewish News.

I have published three books about rabbis who were the Torah leaders in our generation, yet I always hesitated to write about the local Torah leader in Denver, a giant of our generation, the late Rabbi Israel Kagan.

Protagonists of the Iberian age included scholars, translators, mapmakers, instrument makers and pilots. Among them, one figure deserves particular remembrance near Columbus Day: Abraham Zacuto, a Jewish astronomer born in Salamanca around 1452.