Happy Holidays 2008

The Jew Who Helps Run an Important Arab-American Organization in Brooklyn – Tablet Magazine. Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home to an estimated 35,000 Arabs, is the largest Arab-American community outside of Michigan and California. That number is an estimate because no one in government has been able to count. “The community doesn’t like to fill out forms, and for good reason,” a staffer at the Arab-American Association of New York, in Bay Ridge, told me, referring to the recent revelation that the NYPD targeted Muslims for surveillance. Over the next two months, however, the Arabs of Bay Ridge will submit to…

Op-Ed Columnist – Test Your Savvy on Religion – NYTimes.com. So let me give everybody another chance. And given the uproar about Islam, I’ll focus on extremism and fundamentalism — and, as you’ll see, there’s a larger point to this quiz. Note that some questions have more than one correct choice; answers are at the end.

Kate Spear-Brodsky and Louai Abu-Osba – NYTimes.com. In truth, she wasn’t sure what to make of Mr. Abu-Osba, who wore his hair in long dreadlocks. “I thought he was a little bit nerdy,” Ms. Spear-Brodsky said. “He was very sweet and flirty in an innocent way, but I just wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend at the time. Also, he had no game whatsoever.”