Volume 67, Issue 2

Reflecting on America Through Sport
by Albert Jacob
 

Major League Baseball is America’s mirror. Each day, we see the competitive drive combine with the need for teamwork, in our classrooms, in our offices, and on our fields of play. In the past month, we witnessed the latest chapter in the ongoing labor dispute between the owners and the players’ union. This well documented feud once again placed the economics of baseball in the limelight. When the players set August 30^th as a strike date, it appeared as if baseball would endure its ninth work stoppage in the past thirty years. Capitalism to its greatest extreme, baseball is not simply a game. Rather, it is a multibillion-dollar industry with two distinct factions, employees and employers. Each side will always seek to secure the deal most favorable to its pocketbooks. This aspect of the game is equally American...

9/11 – A German Perspective
 By Ruben Seth Fogel
 

While America’s East Coast was slowly waking to find a different America on the morning of September 11^th, 2001 – an America without its Twin Towers, an America with its national feeling of security and invulnerability shattered, an America shaken at its very basis – most Germans were already well into their afternoons. A short while after Mohammed Atta flew his Boeing 757 into World Trade Center 2, at approximately 3 p.m. local Berlin time, German radio stations interrupted their programs to issue the first of many announcements about an attack on the World Trade Center. Minutes later, TV stations followed suit, interrupting their programs to report of an attack on the Pentagon and to discuss the World Trade Center impacts. The short lag in international news propagation meant that German stations and news agencies never faced any doubt as to the nature of the plane crashes; the verdict was clear from the very beginning: terrorism. There was no time for a feeling of surprise; shock took over immediately...

Spiritual Surveillance: Watching the Dead of 9/11
 by Jessica Russak

 To even consider writing a retrospective about a year of my life that ended so recently seemed ridiculous. It occurred to me that I had no realistic grasp of the sequence of events that pulled me into Shmira and kept me going for so many months. Shmira is the act of watching over a dead body between its death and burial. A Jewish body—any body really—is sacred, and it contains a soul that isn’t released from this earth until the body is six feet under. Truth be told…I’d never heard of this act until after September 11th...

Rabbi Lamm's Address at September 11 Rally 

We gather today both as Americans and as Jews to express our concern, our heartbreak, and our feelings about the future on a day that has been described by one of the highest military officials of this country as “worse than Pearl Harbor.” It is a black day in American history, and incidentally today is the 23rd of Elul, which is the anniversary of the Nazi destruction of the Vilna ghetto. So both as Jews and as Americans this is a day of irvuv - confusion, chaos for all those whose lives, were lost, whose lives were affected, or will be affected by the loss. The men and women, whether Jews or non-Jews, whether good people or not such good people, all of them are betzelem Elokim, and we mourn for them and with the people who are left...

Personal Reflections: On Refrigerated Trucks and the Resiliency of People
by Jamie S. Hirsch

  September 11, 2001 will forever be remembered by our generation as an infamous, unimaginable day.  From the explosions as the airplanes slammed into buildings to the heroism of the FDNY, NYPD, and various other groups, this day will surely not be forgotten...

The Bond Markets and September 11^th
by Michael Rosner

The bond market paused to commemorate, reflect, and remember colleagues who perished a year ago on the first anniversary of the events of this past September 11th. The Chicago Board of Trade delayed its opening by two hours to commemorate 9/11. There were two moments of silence at 8:46 A.M. and 10:29 A.M. corresponding to the first plane colliding with the World Trade Center and the second tower imploding...

9/11 in Israel
By Moshe Glasser

There are few days in history, especially in our up-to-the-minute, news-saturated world, about which everyone will remember forever exactly where they were and what they were doing. Kennedy’s assassination. The beginning of the Six-Day War.
September 11th...

Heroes of Our Time: The Rebirth of the Significant Hero
by Jamie S. Hirsch

Go back one year to September 10, 2001, and consider what defined a hero, and who our heroes were.  If you’re anything like the Americans polled in an August 2001 issue of U.S. News and World Report, chances are you didn’t consider a single current public figure heroic.  In fact, 1 in 6 respondents could not name a single person, past or present, whom they personally considered to be a hero...

The Hardest Week
by Yonatan Miller

 It’s perhaps the most fun anyone can have suffering.  After the first month of Basic Training in the Israeli Defense Forces, known as Tironut, all infantry soldiers, and soldiers from other branches of the IDF as well, embark on a week called Sada’ut, or “fieldcraft.”  It’s known as the closest thing to a hell-week that the IDF offers.  In Sada’ut, we dealt with constant exposure to the elements, be it the scorching Negev heat during the day or freezing windy nights.  Sleeves had to be rolled down all day as a sort of camouflage, faces were painted, and food was limited to the “delicious” IDF MREs, given in limited quantity.  To make things worse, cell phones, watches, and junk food were all confiscated.  (They didn’t tell us about the junk food part, so when my sergeant found us munching, he made us remember it, the hard way.)...

Terror brings friends together
by Alexander Chester
 

On September 11, 2001, I was in Israel.  That afternoon I was taking a nap when I was woken up by a phone call that informed me of the terrible attacks on the Twin Towers.  As it must have been for many Americans that morning, I awoke to discover that reality was much worse than any dreams I could possibly have had.  I saw that Islamic fundamentalists had hijacked four commercial jets and turned them into targeted missiles, filled with fuel, and aimed at American landmarks...

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