Author Archive | David Bernstein

Quite a remarkable website from B.U. professor Richard Landes, showing Palestinian manipulation of the media with staged scenes, and the cooperation of Palestinian cameramen working for Western news agencies.

The United Food and Commercial Workers wants to call public attention to the crying scandal of a Wal-Mart grocery in Henderson, Nevada’s starting workers at $6.75 an hour. So what does it do? It hires temp workers at $6/hour with no benefits to walk a picket line in 104-degree heat in front of the air-conditioned […]

From Ha’aretz: Advisers appointed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair are proposing that Britain get rid of Holocaust Memorial Day because Muslims find it offensive, the British Sunday Times reported. The draft proposals – which provoked a backlash from British Jewish leaders – want to replace Holocaust Memorial Day with a Genocide Day that would […]

From a New York Times profile of Aaron Horwitz, my brother-in-law’s cousin, murdered on September 11, 2001. Finding Good in a Bad Day Once, Aaron Horwitz had what most people would consider a supremely lousy day. A friend asked him how he would rate it, from 1 to 10, with 1 the worst. “Eight,” he […]

concluding that the problem with Corps of Engineers spending in Louisiana was not a lack of funding (Louisiana receives more than any other state), but an intentional direction by Louisiana politicians of such funds to pork barrel projects that would provide immediate political benefits instead of to boring flood control. Indeed, the article suggests that […]

can be found here. Among other things, it shows that the city was well aware that approximately 100,000 people would not have the means to leave the city on their own in the event of an evacuation order.

The head of the New Orleans convention bureau told NPR today that he is canceling all conventions scheduled to be held in New Orleans through March 2006. This would include the annual Association of American Law Schools conference. Hopefully, the AALS can arrange to either hold the conference later in the year, as suggested by […]

Pulled from the Scholars for Peace in the Middle East Website: President Prof. Menachem Magidor of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has announced that full tuition scholarships at the Rothberg International School will be offered to students affected by Hurricane Katrina. The autumn semester begins on October 9, so there is still plenty of time […]

Long term: Who would have thought that twenty years after I, as a teenager, thought it looked cool to put my baseball cap on backwards (was it a Beastie Boys thing? Who remembers…), that youths, and even some adults (saw a guy in his 30s yesterday), would still be doing it (though there seemed to […]

Some details here. Several universities in Israel have English-language programs for foreign students. I thought this was worth pointing out because the Fall semester in Israel doesn’t start until after the Jewish holidays end in late October, giving affected students the opportunity to reorganize their lives a bit, without delaying their academic careers.

I’ve read in several places that funding was recently cut for protecting New Orleans from a flood like the one that just occurred. If that’s true, it’s a damning indictment of the Republicans, especially the Republican Congress. Since 1998, Congress has been on a profligate spending spree unmatched since at least the Johnson Great Society […]

according to CNN.

Here’s a very insightful, though overly long, discussion of European anti-Americanism, and its connection to European anti-Semitism. A taste After World War I, ‘the Jews as rulers of America’ became pronounced. It was at this juncture that the notions of Jewish Wall Street, Jewish Hollywood, Jewish Jazz, in other words of a thoroughly “Jewified” America […]

According to this article in Ha’aretz, U.S. Jewish leaders across the political spectrum think there is something not competely kosher about the indictment of two former AIPAC leaders for receiving classified documents, but they are keeping silent, for now, waiting to see how it plays out. The most disturbing quote from the article: The investigation […]

Just read that 61% of all new California mortgages this year are interest only, no money down. This is especially important because California (like a few other states, but, unlike, say, D.C. area jurisdictions where about 50% of the new mortgages are interest only) has a law requiring that all mortgages be “non-recourse,” i.e., if […]