A friend sent me a link to this speech from the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League at a conference today. Excerpt:
And let me say this. There recently have been reports that the new Administration plans to force Muslim-Americans to register for some sort of master government list ( Read more... )

TIL #1:

Somebody linked to this question on Stack Overflow about some unexpected results when doing math on dates in Java. The problem, according to Jon Skeet, is that the date being used in the calculation is near midnight on December 31, 1927 in the Shanghai time zone -- when Shanghai moved its clocks by 5 minutes and 52 seconds. So the time ( Read more... )

Today is Yom HaShoah (Holocaust remembrance day). I don't know what is done elsewhere, but my Conservative morning minyan adds a short service after the torah service. It consists of some psalms and some modern writings, and ends with an unusual Kaddish. The Kaddish text is the usual text, but it's interspersed with the names of camps -- ( Read more... )

There is, apparently, a construction company out there that will build you a house styled on a Hobbit hole. Naturally, an important question arises for Jewish owners of such homes: do you put a mezuzah on a round door, and if so where? The mezuzah is the scroll (containing certain torah passages) in a case that is affixed to your doorpost -- so ( Read more... )

Dear Jewish LJ brain trust ( Read more... )

The Stack Exchange network has many great Q&A sites, several of which I'm pretty heavily involved with. (I just passed 100k reputation network-wide.) My first and favorite site is Mi Yodeya, the site for Jewish questions and answers. The quality level is very high; I've learned a lot.
SE started with Stack Overflow, for expert programmers, and ( Read more... )

This weekend I attended a celebration of Mi Yodeya's fifth birthday, hosted by the site's patriarch and his family, who had the decency to move this summer to within driving distance of my house. So I got to go. I had a great time ( Read more... )

Those of you who enjoy the religion-related posts here might be interested in this new blog (see intro post) for questions and answers about the bible, particularly the Hebrew bible (Tanakh). There's a link there for question submissions, and there are a bunch of posts there so you can get a sense of what to expect ( Read more... )

Can anybody answer this question on Mi Yodeya? Is it permissible for a Jew to participate in an online religion-related community that is largely made up of Christians?The halachic issues are, I am told, complex and nuanced, and that's even before adding the internet into the mix. (Maybe in-person meetings like local study groups are different ( Read more... )

The tulips are starting to appear in my yard. We sure went from snow to spring-verging-on-summer in a hurry. But it's supposed to be in the 30s over the weekend ( Read more... )