Zany Misadventures in Identity Politics: Rosh Hashanah Edition

Barry Dredze
4 min readSep 29, 2022
Yiddish new year postcard, circa 1910; reads “the sky has split!” (in the scroll) and in the storm cloud, “good things.” (via the Hidden Treasures project of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; from the collection of Doris Levinson)

We observed a new Hebrew calendar year, Rosh Hashanah, in this last Gregorian week of September 2022, hoping to be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life for 5783.

While I am only about half an hour into the first episode of the Ken Burns PBS documentary The US and the Holocaust, I do not usually prefer to watch Holocaust movies. Having grown up on a…

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Barry Dredze

Just another mortal, tweaking my cognitive map on the fly.