Snapshot

I interviewed Yehezkel Caine earlier this year (IJN Generations, July 3), I never dreamed that one of the topics about which we spoke would manifest a few months later. After all, a pilot hijacking a plane is “exceedingly rare,” according to Caine. If anyone should know, it is he. Caine is an expert in aviation medicine, which among its many facets includes the physical and mental health of airline crews.

Earlier this summer, when we published a profile of Ramah of the Rockies’ Rabbi Eliav Bock, one of my oldest friends told me that she and he shared a kibbutz family, one year apart, and that he was a close friend of one of her college friends.

I will take anyone’s wager that if Israel tomorrow appointed a new centrist prime minister who immediately pulled the IDF out of Gaza and put a moratorium on settlement expansion, people like Zohran Mamdani and Ed Miliband would still condemn Israel.

There are moments in history seared into collective memory. 
 Twenty-five years ago, the world was tilted on its axis when terrorists hijacked multiple airliners, destroyed lower Manhattan and murdered 2,977 people. We have never fully recovered.

The day before Cantor Zachary Kutner’s funeral, I happened to be speaking with Rabbi Tzvi Steinberg, formerly of Zera Abraham, who lives on the East Coast.

A hot topic of debate these days is defining anti-Semitism — almost to the point where the definition is discussed more than the actual anti-Semitism. At the Boulder Valley School District hearing this month some people spent more time decrying the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism than they did expressing concern that children were physically harassed and bullied because they were Jewish.

What was the largest forced population transfer in human history? Most will be surprised to hear that it was of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to Germany, following the Nazis’ defeat in WW II.

In case you missed it, I’ve started a puzzle gemach (free loan). Thousand-piece puzzles have become one of my favorite ways to tune out the world. As one works on a puzzle, it’s nearly impossible to think about anything outside the puzzle.

Apparently, I’m what’s called a “Doehead.” I’d never heard the term before last month. It refers to people who are very into Colorado’s HAW Tabor, Augusta and Baby Doe saga.

August 1. It is the birthday of the two places where I have lived the longest — Colorado and Switzerland, two places I call home. In 1291, three men met on a field in Switzerland to take an oath, committing to an alliance. A little over half a millennium later, 585 years to be exact, Colorado declared statehood, earning itself the moniker the Centennial state.