sarah in nyc

Our friends invited us to join them last night for  this book talk  at Temple Emanuel. The talk was between Yaakov Katz  former editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post and Bret Stephens. The book is about Israel's failures to anticipate the awful events of October 7. When we got to the synagogue, the entire block was cordoned off with not only police barriers but also with large granite blocks around the synagogue . Police were stationed at each corner asking people to show their tickets to the lecture. After getting through the police barriers we had to go through a security checkpoint to get in. There were a fair number of New York City police inside. The audience as most free lectures in New York tended to be older. The lecture hall was ringed by synagoge security officers and New York City police.  At first I thought this was overkill. Soon after the conversation between the two journalists began, a masked audience member began shouting. he wasn't trying to engage...

 The other day we took a bus from the Port Authority Bus Station. When I was in college I traveled through the fetid halls of the Port Authority Bus Station often.  The bus station has been going through a series of improvements over the past several years. Before we boarded our bus I realized that I needed to use the bathroom. I assumed that it would be the same exercise of nose holding that it was in the past. I was shocked. The bathroom was spotless.  If I ever told my mother that  I was going anywhere in Manhattan, she would let me know where the nice nearby bathrooms were. I thought that she should publish a guide to all of the best publicly available bathrooms in Manhattan. Someone else published that book. If she were updating me about excellent bathrooms in midtown -west she would have suggested using the Port Authority bathrooms. This George Segal sculpture has been near the local bus ticketing windows for the last many years. I never pass this sculpture whe...