by Matthew Friedman | Jan 19, 2023 | Commentary, Essays, Jewish Life
There is a note of tragic foreboding in the twelfth chapter of the first Book of Kings. This is where “Israel rebelled against the house of David” and the Kingdom of Israel, united under Saul, David, and Solomon, is split asunder as Jeroboam, a head man of the tribe...
by Matthew Friedman | Jan 5, 2023 | Commentary, Jewish Life
Amnesia is perhaps the only blessing of the rapid-fire news cycle. These are, after all, dark and trying times, and, as one headline horror falls upon the last, they each wash away prior outrages rather than piling up to be faintly recalled in year-end news roundups…...
by Matthew Friedman | Dec 2, 2022 | Commentary
Short, fragmented lines, like shards of broken glass in the sun, skipping from one facet to the next, thoughts interrupted and reconstituted on-the-fly, sometimes wandering, sometimes rushing forward – this was the Bob Hogg I met through the medium of poetry. The...
by Matthew Friedman | Oct 12, 2022 | Commentary, Essays, Jewish Life
It stopped me dead in my tracks as I was walking down Newark Ave. in Jersey City one morning in the winter of 2016, on my way to the Grove Street Path station: Someone had painted a large black swastika, surrounded by repeated instances of the doppelte Siegrune icon...
by Matthew Friedman | Sep 25, 2022 | Commentary, Essays
Malachy Salter was the great mythical ancestor of my mother’s family. We held him up as a kind of buccaneering merchant hero who operated two privateers under Letters of Marque from King George II and King George III, first out of Boston and then, as was the case of...
by Matthew Friedman | Sep 8, 2022 | Commentary
I recall a college history professor once saying that Richard Coeur de Lion is remembered as one of Britain’s greatest monarchs mostly because he spent a little less than six months of his ten-year reign in Britain. His brother John, who ruled as regent as Richard...