Then there is The Celebrity Apprentice, which just premiered its fourteenth season.
.. Plus, she says, “we have an unbelievable cast who, as my father says, just hate each other. Which is good!”
.. Donald Trump is virtually synonymous with the modern-day concept of branding.
.. The Apprentice made her famous: a 20-something real estate diva. As she herself points out, “Young professionals don’t usually have pop-culture relevance.” She started getting piles of fan mail from girls who wanted to grow up to be just like her.
.. “So, my husband’s idea of a date night somehow always involves me looking at one of his development sites.” Everyone nods knowingly.
.. And that is when she saw that there was a big hole in the market: No one was designing for the young professional woman who wants clothes with more style than Ann Taylor but not as fashion-disposable as H&M.
.. “We are targeting millennials who aspire to have very big careers, but they are also training for marathons or learning French or starting a family. Every aspect of their life is just as important to them as their careers.”
.. Me and my peers, we’re working really hard at being moms and sisters and professionals. There was a previous generation of women who rose through the ranks in an environment when work and life were highly compartmentalized. And I think now, because of technology, we’re always on.
.. It’s about empowerment and redefining what it means to be a woman in this generation.”
.. XiXi, the nanny, who is Chinese and is teaching the children to speak Mandarin.
.. “His own dreams are bold, and I love that in someone,” says Ivanka, “but he’s incredibly relaxed and calm. The world could be collapsing around him, and nothing fazes him. He’s very solution-oriented. Plus it was nice finding someone who is a genuinely good person.
.. “For me, being so close to work is everything. I get here in three minutes and give them a bath, read to them, and put them to bed, and then I go out almost every night right afterward with Jared.”
.. “I would say she is definitely the CEO of our household, whereas I’m more on the board of directors.
.. Jared’s brother, Joshua, has his own venture-capital firm and was an early investor in Instagram.
.. He is also dating Karlie Kloss
.. This gives some sense of the intersecting worlds that Jared and Ivanka travel in: fashion, finance, media, art, real estate, technology, society
.. In some ways they are the twenty-first-century analog to the It Power Couple that her parents were during the go-go eighties.
.. But I would say Jared and Ivanka are centered in a more low-key, contemporary, family way. I think they don’t need to be as sort of . . . out there in the more outlandish eighties way that my parents were.”
.. Two of the people who are often in those smaller groups are Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky. “She’s always aware of everyone around her and ensuring that everyone is enjoying the moment,” says Chelsea. “It’s an awareness that in some ways reminds me of my dad, and his ability to increase the joy of the room.
.. “There’s not a lot of bullshit in Ivanka’s life. Living through everything that she saw as a kid, she has a very good filter on what’s real, what’s not, what’s worthwhile, and what’s not.
.. movers and shakers
.. with Judaism, it creates an amazing blueprint for family connectivity.”
“Also the ritual for us having Sabbath,” says Jared... “Yeah, we observe the Sabbath,” says Ivanka, sipping her lychee martini. “From Friday to Saturday we don’t do anything but hang out with one another. We don’t make phone calls.”
.. ‘If we’re going to do Shabbos, I’m going to cook.’ She never cooked before in her life, and became a great cook. So for Friday, she’ll make dinner for just the two of us, and we turn our phones off for 25 hours.
.. And for Arabella to know that she has me, undivided, one day a week? We don’t do anything except play with each other, hang out with one another, go on walks together. Pure family.”
.. If I was married to somebody who, even if beneath the surface, didn’t like the fact that I work so hard or didn’t support my ambitions for myself or felt self-conscious about my last name . . . I think it would be very hard to build a solid foundation on that.”
Leonard Cohen’s Life of Poetry and Song
If there is any lyric that condenses his work it is, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
.. Petrified, he told his lawyer he couldn’t sing, but his friend shot back that “none of you guys can sing, if I wanna hear singing I’ll go to the Metropolitan Opera!”
.. “Hallelujah” had been released originally in 1984 on his Various Positions album, but with only lukewarm support from his record label, CBS. Years later, when Cohen accepted an award, he thanked CBS with trademark irony for “the modesty of their interest” in his work.
.. A Palestinian boycott group stated, “Ramallah will not receive Cohen as long as he is intent on whitewashing Israel’s colonial apartheid regime by performing in Israel.”
.. Given the spiritual and deep theological tenor of his work, it is perhaps surprising he became such a star, and had it not been for “Hallelujah” he may have remained an acquired taste.
.. His work was genuinely and deeply rooted in being a Jew and in the traditional Jewish texts, Psalms, mysticism, and practice, and he directly employed biblical texts. “Hallelujah” is a prime example, where his lyrics juxtapose the texts of 1 and 2 Samuel and Judges 16, while the refrain of Hallelujah rings out:
.. He became a vegetarian, but said he stopped because he decided he was getting too arrogant about it.
.. In his last public appearance Cohen explained he didn’t consider himself a religious person but made use of the frames of reference of his upbringing.
This echoed a New York Times interview in 1968, in which he said, “Our natural vocabulary is Judeo-Christian. That is our blood-myth. We have to rediscover law from inside our own heritage, and we have to rediscover the crucifixion. The crucifixion will again be understood as a universal symbol, not as an experiment in sadism or masochism or arrogance. It will have to be rediscovered because that’s where man is at. On the cross.” This was his credo.
.. in Isaiah 53, a chapter central to the Christian idea of Isaiah as the “fifth gospel,” attesting to the suffering servant.
.. In his final interview, Cohen said he was still hearing the voice of God, but now it was different. He said it was no longer the judging God of his youth, “that voice that says, ‘You’re fucking up.’” This was a compassionate God, giving a tremendous blessing. He said, “I’m ready to die, I hope it’s not uncomfortable,” and he spent his last days putting his house in order.
.. Cohen took years to write a song, Dylan often took just 15 minutes. The difference was that Dylan was a songwriter, while Cohen started as a poet and novelist—though in a 1961 interview Cohen contested the term “poet”; he said he was a writer, and the exalted term “poet” should only be applied at the end of a writer’s work, as a verdict on his life.
Rabbi David Wolpe on leadership, religion, and identity
But the idea is that, the way the Talmud puts it is that somebody who is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind.
.. There’s one place I think in Survival in Auschwitz where Primo Levi talks about a bricklayer, that the Nazis asked him to build a wall, and he couldn’t persuade himself to build it badly. He just couldn’t because that was his pride. And it reminded me that there’s this great — that I haven’t read for years and I’m sure I could find it — but there’s a [Guy de] Maupassant story about a guy who’s a circus performer, and what he does is he fires arrows into an apple on his wife’s head, and that’s their circus act, and he starts to hate his wife and he wants to kill her, but he can’t bring himself to do it wrong.
.. Look, there is going back to Yehudah ha-Levi and going through the Tanya, and woven through Hasidism, is the question of whether Jews have different souls from non-Jews in some essential way. That I don’t think you’d be particularly comfortable with, nor am I. It’s what a great American rabbi who passed away not so long away, Harold Schulweis, used to call metaphysical racism.
.. “Well, I wrote an article that ended up on Facebook in a very different setting than how I intended it to be read.” And you can say all you want — all the hyperlinks are there, but people don’t click through.
What do you think is the intellectual future of a belief system based on commentary on commentary on commentary, now injected into a world with this technology that so strips away context and just gives you some bald statement of something?
WOLPE: I think that Judaism has the same problem that any thick civilization has in a world in which, as you say, context is stripped away. And not only is context stripped away, but attention to any one thing is scanter and less than it used to be.
So, for example, a lot of Jewish commentary is based on your recognizing the reference that I make. Who recognizes references anymore? Because people don’t spend years studying books.
.. So what I would say, the quick answer to the very end of it is, not all anti-Israel sentiment is anti-Semitism, but anti-Israel sentiment is now the respectable guise for anti-Semitism. Very few people, only the most fringy fringers, will stand up and say “I’m an anti-Semite.” But you can say “I’m anti-Israel” and be an anti-Semite and that’s respectable. . . . And I think there are lots of tests that you can apply to the way people criticize Israel and the way they criticize other places that will let you know what’s behind it.
.. The Koran is — and this you should excuse me, for the home team, I like Judaism much better — the Koran is very unwilling to allow any sinfulness in its heroes.
COWEN: He’s much more heroic, David; as is Moses.
WOLPE: Much more, as is Moses, as is everyone in the story.
COWEN: Never so hesitant.
WOLPE: Right, exactly. I like the idea of flawed heroes. I like the notion that there isn’t this whitewashing. And I feel the Quran does that. But obviously, I’m not a Muslim.
.. I would say, if I had to pick one thing that is at the heart of Islam that is antidemocratic, it is the concept that’s very deep — that is, in the very name of the religion — of submission. Because a population that is trained essentially to submit is a population that will create authoritarians.
.. “Jews don’t listen. They wait.”
.. What I would say is that the problem with the case is it doesn’t take into account two parts of the calculus that are important pieces of this. One is that it is an element of security to allow your neighbors to feel a certain way about their neighbors. And therefore, if you build in total disregard of the people in the neighborhood, that’s not going to encourage goodwill. That’s the first part of the case that I would urge. And, by the way, this works in extending circles around the world that Israel is not an island, and the opinion of the world also matters in this.
And the second part of the case is that the idea that ultimately the population around you will be reconciled to this in one way or another — in other words the endgame — doesn’t work for me. I don’t think that eventually the Palestinians will be absorbed into Israel and will feel OK about it if their standard of living is high enough
.. what did we lose with Maimonides’s aggregation of Jewish law with the Mishneh Torah? What Maimonides wanted to do was take all of this messy giant Talmudic and other tradition and make it simple. And one of the things that he did that he later said he regretted but didn’t have the chance to fix was, he didn’t add footnotes. So we don’t know.
.. Hermann Cohen said very beautifully, “In the idea of the stranger, Judaism was born.”
.. Given how many literally billions of people have been elevated from poverty by, what is mostly in my account, capitalism, not only capitalism, Milton Friedman saw this, but still the weight of Jewish intellectual opinion in the United States has mostly been on the Left. I think that’s a well-established regularity. What’s the intellectual or sociological reason for that underlying . . . ?
WOLPE: Well, I’ll say why that is and then one thing about capitalism that I think is profoundly Jewish that most people don’t realize, seriously.
I think the reason is because they came from Eastern Europe, and that tradition, like the FDR tradition in America, is very . . . the only way that you could see out of the morass of the civilizations they were in, the only thing that gave them hope other than Zionism, was a kind of Bundist, Marxist, socialist . . . there wasn’t really a living capitalist alternative. To the very first glance, it looked like the humanistic face of economics as opposed to . . . what is capitalism — competition. Well, that doesn’t look like a humanistic face.
.. “A real capitalist has to have empathy.” Because if you’re building a business or a product and you don’t know what other people want, you’ll fail. The only way you can succeed is if you actually understand what it is that other people want and/or need. And both that combined with what you said, which is that it is the great engine of wealth that lifts people out of poverty, I think that a Jewish thinker today, and certainly many in Israel would argue this too, that you would have to be a capitalist of some stripe.
.. So Conservative Judaism, the dilemma that Conservative Judaism had was that it tried to hold on to a serious Jewish observance with modern scholarship that didn’t consistently say, “God told you, you have to do this.” And modern Jewish observance is a very hard thing to hold on to. And so people who had grown up with the traditional observance lived that out, but as the motivational piece of it weakened, so did that lifestyle that would maintain them as Conservative Jews.
Unless and until — not only Conservative Judaism by the way, but liberal religion in general — unless and until . . .
But the problem is worse in Judaism because it makes greater demands than other religions. Christianity doesn’t make such lifestyle demands on Christians as Judaism does on Jews. Unless and until there is a compelling nonfundamentalist rationale for why I should eat a certain way and why I shouldn’t go out on Saturday, in other words, the ritual behaviors that maintain the cohesion of the tradition. Until that is created — and many philosophers have tried to and many rabbis have tried — till that’s created, Conservative Judaism is going to face a huge uphill battle. That’s the short answer.
.. AUDIENCE MEMBER: The United States Supreme Court is currently comprised only of Catholics and Jews. Do you think that these groups naturally produce better jurists?
[laughter]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: If so why, and if not, why is that the composition of the court?
WOLPE: I defer here to an answer that I heard given by my sociologist brother at a session we did together in South Africa last summer. Which is probably a sentence you’ve never heard uttered before, right? I defer to my sociologist brother in a session we did together in South Africa. [laughs]
Because Catholicism has a natural law tradition, Judaism has a strong legal tradition, and Protestantism is antinomian: it’s anti-law. That’s the essence of Protestantism, right? So who around here is trained in law? Oh, the Catholics and the Jews. Now, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be individual Protestants, but if you’re looking for a deep tradition, well, we got one.
A ship full of refugees fleeing the Nazis once begged the U.S. for entry. They were turned back.
Nine hundred thirty-seven.
That was the number of passengers aboard the SS St. Louis, a German ocean liner that set off from Hamburg on May 13, 1939. Almost all of those sailing were Jewish people, desperate to escape the Third Reich. The destination was Havana, more than two weeks away by ship.
.. “Many Cubans resented the relatively large number of refugees (including 2,500 Jews), whom the government had already admitted into the country, because they appeared to be competitors for scarce jobs,” the museum noted. “Hostility toward immigrants fueled both antisemitism and xenophobia. Both agents of Nazi Germany and indigenous right-wing movements hyped the immigrant issue in their publications and demonstrations, claiming that incoming Jews were Communists.”
.. The “St. Louis Manifest” Twitter account, which gained more than 52,000 followers within two days, was the product of Russel Neiss, a Jewish activist and educator who used data from the Holocaust museum to build the bot.
.. The current situation in Syria is “probably the easiest example in the world today of people being massacred by a political tyrant,” Hathaway said. “That we would not read the tea leaves of history and understand that the people fleeing are the enemies of our enemy is beyond comprehension to me.”