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How long since you had to look inside a math book? Because here's a question that might have got by you: A down payment on a home costs $5,000. Housing one brain-damaged man for a year costs $20,000. How many families lose homes to mental retardation? This extra-credit teaser comes from a Nazi-endorsed schoolbook (currency adjusted). It was the first step in curing society of the unneeded. Shortly after, with the country now ready, beautiful killings ("euthanasia" in Latin) began. It is comforting to think that Nazis were demons rather than humans. But following their defeat you couldn't find an...

I'm very rich. That I never hear. I'm very humble. That I never hear. I'm very spiritual. Ah, at that I cringe very often. Why don't they realize spirituality is humility? Truth is, when they say "spiritual" they mean abstract: a quest for the unnoticed, unstated, the uncommon. But spirituality, in that definition, is not something inherently good, worthy or desirable. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak (known in Yiddish as the Freidike Rebbe) was unimpressed by yeshiva bochurim, the boys in yeshiva, who opened the refrigerator just to see what was inside. When I first heard that, at about fifteen, I pretty...

My grandmother came to America -- from Russia with a four-year stopover in Israel -- around 1930. She, with her husband and two infant boys, settled in a Jewish neighborhood in New Jersey. The older boys in the neighborhood welcomed them by snatching their yarmulkes off their heads. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak (the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe) was visiting America around that time. His death sentence had only recently been commuted to life in internal exile, and shortly thereafter he was released/deported from Workers' Paradise. In America Jews lined up to seek his counsel, his blessing. My grandmother came into his room:...