Movie Review: 1925 – Phantom of the Opera
Today’s old movie review – Phantom of the Opera, 1925. It’s a silent horror film which is surprisingly watchable and actually scary at times with very ominous music, great make-up, and well a faster...
Author: tostien
Movie Review: 1916 – Intolerance
Classic movie reviews for today – my daughter and I, during all this home time, have started watching movies from the 1910s forward: 1916 – Intolerance: This movie is a reaction to Griffith’s 1915...
Rosh HaNikra Grottoes and Nahariya
Some Intro to the Northwest Corner of Israel This trip takes you to the northern most Mediterranean coast of Israel to the Grottoes (a fancy word for ‘cave’) at Rosh HaNikra (meaning ‘head of...
Life at 40: Musings on Turning 40
To celebrate my 40th birthday, I went down a belt buckle and joined a gym for the first time in my life. Not bad. Then I started jotting down some thoughts about the hard-won...
Discomfort: Jewish Holidays in a Nutshell
Judaism is about discomfort. What do I mean by that? I mean we want to avoid it’s opposite – no, not “comfort” but “complacency.” The English language sometimes trips us up as words that...
Kosher Vacation in Dominican Republic – Revisited
Introduction In 2015 we went to Peurto Plata, Dominican Republic where there is a full time Rabbi supervising two kosher kitchens (dairy and meat) on a resort filled with beaches and pools. In 2019...
Eastern Long Island, Mystic, CT – Beaches and Car Ferr
A Vacation Based on Curiosity Did you ever wonder what’s at the very eastern tip of Long Island? What happens when you travel out the end of Queens, then Nassau County, past the cemeteries,...
Parental Controls – My “Hashkafa” and What Works for Our Family
Introduction I grew up in the age of BBSes … bulletin board systems. Back in my day, it took about 20 minutes on a 2400 baud modem to download a single 640×480 pixel image...
Israel Separate Beaches
Introduction to Israel’s Separate Beaches In the Untied States, we go to the beach before Memorial Day, after Labor Day, on a weekday morning, or a weekday evening and one can usually find a...
After the Holocaust – Why Didn’t Jews Just Return to Europe? . . . and Yad V’Shem
A question in the back of my mind At Yad V’Shem, Israel’s primary holocaust museum in Jerusalem, I picked up a copy of “The Jews are Coming Back“, a book about the return of...