And Now For Something Completely Different…
The smoky heat of summer seems to have given way to the first snow of the season with only a few days of whipping rain in between. I know it’s […]
Category Archives: asia
A Thanksgiving on Planet Tokyo, 1987
It was late November in 1987, in a cramped studio apartment lost in the urban sprawl west of Tokyo, that I realized Socrates was wrong. Hunger, Cicero had quoted him […]
The Bookseller of Jerusalem
So many things to still unpack out of my head from the Israel trip – I expect the stories are going to keep dribbling out over the next couple of […]
Yom Hazikaron
At precisely 11:00, a siren wail rose in the distance; seconds later another, closer, joined the chorus. We were halfway down Machane Yehuda, the crowded, bustling vegetable market on the […]
Princes and Prime Ministers
The second time, a place is familiar, the third time it is comfortable, the fourth time, it is home. This morning was Ramallah again, and while I think it would […]
Overload
This happens some times, when I’ve seen too much, when I’ve heard too much. I come down the stairs, turn left across the street, and it hits, like a wave […]
Into the World of the Haredi
The voice in my head was excited: “Hey! Hey! Hey!” “Mmmmm. Huh? Uh….What?” “You know what time it is?” “Let me guess: six a.m.?” “Right! Time to get up!” “Uh, […]
A Jerusalem Quest
King Arthur knew that nothing revives the spirits like a good quest. And it doesn’t even have to be for something fabulous or grail-like. I once drove the length of […]
Meetings.
Yesterday? Yesterday was meetings. More meetings. Sorry, I’d love to write a glorious narrative of Explorations in the Holy Land, but the real narrative here is “We talked with a […]
Layers, Levels, and Unintended Consequences
First day of meetings – we get context, or at least the start of it. Like the city itself, there are layers built upon layers, going down through the centuries, […]
David Pablo Cohn 