Good Shabbat Tidings I Bring

(You know Jews wrote all the Christmas songs)

Hey, beloved tribe.

I am beyond thrilled that this week's Jew Of The Universe is Dr. Paul Offit: inventor of the rotavirus vaccine -- which has saved the lives of millions of children to date -- and four-star general on the front lines of public health.

I feel that this is by far the most important JOTU column I've ever written. I've enabled comments on the magazine site for everyone, and I hope people will show the good doctor some love over at JUDITH. Despite constant harassment and countless death threats, he fearlessly and tirelessly continues to devote his life to the welfare of children, and he is a true and valiant hero.

Here is the start of the article:

“I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a doctor. I was born with club feet – my feet sort of turned down and inward. By the time I was five, my father was distressed over the fact that my right heel couldn’t touch the ground. So he insisted that my foot be operated on. This was not a good idea but he couldn’t be dissuaded.

At first, my mother couldn’t get an appointment with the Club Foot Clinic at Johns Hopkins. So she called my grandfather’s brother — her uncle — who was the biggest bookie in Baltimore and maybe even the country. His name was Buckley Offit.

He was like the Jewish Godfather, a real macher, the patriarch of the family. And all his transactions were paid for in cash. A memoir was written about him by my mother’s cousin, actually, titled Memoir Of The Bookie’s Son, and there was also a fictional account of his life, The Other Side Of The Street.

In any event, he called the clinic and, lo and behold, suddenly an appointment was available.

And so my foot was operated on. Badly. There was no real operation to correct a club foot at the time. Ultimately the procedure was perfected in the mid-90s, but this was 40 years earlier. In any case, it was a failed surgery and it landed me in the Kernan Hospital For Crippled Children. I grew up in an era where you could use words like “crippled” and “feeble-minded” in the names of children’s hospitals.

I was there for around 6 weeks. If you’re in a chronic care facility in 1956, you’re going to be in a place with a polio ward. And there was a polio ward there, complete with those rows of iron lungs. And I remember witnessing those children getting the so-called “Sister Kenny Hot Pack Treatments,” in which these excruciatingly hot packs were placed on withered arms and legs as a way of trying to relieve muscle spasms and increase function in the affected limbs.

I remember listening to those kids screaming. It was literally hell, like something out of a Dickens novel.

And these wards allowed visits for just one hour a week, on Sundays from 2 to 3 pm. My father, who was a traveling salesman, was always on the road, so he didn’t come. My mother was on bed rest from complications with her current pregnancy, so she never came.

So I just remember: *nobody came*. I was abandoned in this awful place. I remember that my bed was on a balcony overlooking the front door of the hospital and I just kept watching that door, waiting for someone to walk through it and save me. But it didn’t happen.

So I had the most visceral awareness of the children on that ward as being vulnerable and helpless and alone. It was a scarring event, and I believe the passions of our adulthood are often tied to the scars of our childhood. So that was mine, and I think it drove me into pediatric infectious diseases."

TO READ THE REST, PLEASE VISIT JUDITH MAGAZINE HERE.

Also, please repost, share, send it far and wide if at all possible, because if ever a message was essential to spread right now, it’s his.

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Okay, onward: for those attending this Sunday’s event with Nicole Graev Lipson (and I truly hope to see you there!), the Zoom link is HERE. Please share with any Jew you know who might have an interest in joining.

Once more: the event is 10 am Pacific time, 1 pm in NYC, 8 pm in Israel.

Nicole is absolutely brilliant and lovely in every way, and I know it’s going to be a great conversation. Bring your questions!

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Finally, as we head into Shabbat, I want to sing the praises, yet again, of American rapper and singer-songwriter Ms. Azealia Banks. Jews don’t have patron saints, but if we did, she would most certainly be our patron saint of trash-and-propaganda-blasting blazing integrity.

On my personal wall of The Righteous Among The Nations, she is the reigning queen of this moment!

When you’ve been gaslit as long and hard and relentlessly as we have over the past 21 months, it’s a shock and inexpressible relief just to see one person on a public stage cut through all the anti-Zionist hysteria and just say what should be completely obvious to anyone with eyes, ears, and even a shred of historical knowledge.

I think my very favorite part is this:

Imagine never reading a book, having failed history class, spent a ton of money on college to have lectures and end up with no job no common sense, just idealistic surface level bullshit and some buzzwords…

But the whole screed is a thing of beauty. Behold:

Idealistic surface level bullshit is such a lovely gem of a phrase.

It’s like Mandy Patinkin and his vague platitudes: We stand for peace. What the hell does that even mean? It’s so freaking easy to say something like that, but seriously, what does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s an evasion. He had to say something and that’s what he came up with it. If you could phone in a response to a massacre, or get AI to craft the safest possible statement, empty of any sound and any fury and yet still managing to signify nothing, that would be it. A tale told by an idiot, indeed.

Okay, fam. Fuck all this; it’s Shabbat. I hope you have a lovely one. I’ll be back with you next week.

So much love in the meantime. Shabbat shalom!

Am Yisrael Chai.