(Today's subject line is from a Jewish blessing.)

I picked up a copy of Chinese for Dummies earlier this year, but am only now getting around to looking at it. Given my own background, I am somewhat amused that I will be learning from one Wendy Abraham, "the only Jewish kid to try to join the Chinese Students Association" at Hunter College.

After spending an afternoon on the Weizmann campus, and a couple hours at the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University - it adds something to reading Walter Isaacson's article about How Einstein Divided America's Jews. I don't quite know how to characterize it - on the one hand, visiting those specific places and learning more about Weizmann didn't alter anything fundamental about my existing beliefs. On the other hand, it's not unlike reading the wedding or funeral announcement of someone I've met vs. someone I've merely heard of - there's an extra something.

Anyhow. Some other articles and posts about Judaism have been catching my eye as well. Via tonight's visit to about.com, I have learned that there exists a Nice Jewish Guys calendar (...WHERE WAS THIS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL?), that turkeys are indeed kosher (had no idea that anyone thought they weren't), and about a woman who was arrested at the Wall last month for wearing a prayer shawl. (Reading the background article, this sentence stood out to me: "...people are noticing the increasingly fundamentalist practices being enforced at the Kotel, with the end result being that visitors leave the wall with negative memories of one of Judaism's most important sites." Well, yes: though I wouldn't call partitioning men and women especially fundamentalist, my own first visit to the Wall is not one of my happier memories of Jerusalem.

Last (for tonight) but not least, Roger Cohen wrote for the NYT about growing up Jewish in 1960s England, where "nobody I know ever defined a Jew, or persecuted one, on the grounds of whether or not he went to synagogue regularly," but where he and his parents nonetheless had to contend with "that faint prejudice floating around with its power to generate I'm-not-quite-one-of-them feelings." And his closing sentence is a corker - I don't actually agree with him, since in my experience, people here do care a whole hell of lot who you're descended from - but in spite of that, I'm both charmed and moved by how Cohen states, "I still believe the greatest strength of America, its core advantage over the old world, is its lack of interest in where you're from and consuming interest in what you can do."