This Friday, September 15, marks Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. This year, however, Rosh Hashanah also marks the 100th anniversary of the Daf Yomi, a program for daily Talmud study that has become a staple throughout the Jewish world and brought some measure of unity to an increasingly fragmented people.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

Yankees legend George Herman "Babe" Ruth died 75 years ago Tuesday, on Aug. 16, 1948. He was just 53.

Over the course of his career, Ruth hit 714 home runs and 60 home runs in a season — both records at the time — and led his teams to seven World Series titles, as both a pitcher and then a hitter.

While Ruth is well known even to non-baseball fans, less known are his decades of interactions with American presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman and even beyond.

In 1915, Wilson became the first president to attend a World Series, which pitted Ruth's Red Sox against the Phillies. Ruth later recalled, "President Wilson was always a great friend of mine."

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

For the past four decades, Richard Norton Smith has been writing door-stopper biographies of 20th-century Republican political figures, including Thomas Dewey, Herbert Hoover, Robert McCormick, and Nelson Rockefeller. His latest subject is Gerald Ford, a 13-term Michigan congressman who was never elected to the presidency or vice presidency but fell into these jobs as a result of two unprecedented freaks of history. The first was Spiro Agnew's resignation from the second-highest office in the country due to a bribery scandal, which led to Ford's elevation in 1973. The second was Richard's Nixon's resignation a year later over Watergate, which put Ford into the Oval Office. During his two and a half years as president, Ford was, alas, best known for his televised stumbles, and for his unpopular pardoning of Nixon, which likely cost Ford a chance at a second term.

Continue to the full review  |  More reviews and articles

When I was preparing to leave the George W. Bush administration after Barack Obama's 2008 election, I had a conversation with a career security officer at the Department of Health and Human Services. He had his own thoughts on what the transition of administrations would mean, telling me that "with the Democrats coming in, we have to turn a blind eye to sex and drugs on our background checks."

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

In the early 2000s, I met with fellow Bush White House aides Elliott Abrams and Jay Lefkowitz in the latter's West Wing office to discuss the problem of anti-Semitism in the United States. Anti-Semitism at the time was not as severe as it is today, but the number of anti-Semitic incidents had been rising; more than 1,000 occurred in the year 2000. In the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Jewish communal organizations had also begun hardening their infrastructures to protect themselves and their members against anti-Semitic terrorism.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles