The disappearing rabbis: fun Zoomin’ today ....
Plus: the best philanthropic gift of the week (month? century?).
A couple quick things, for people who share my interests.
A couple weeks back, my friend Shira Telushkin wrote this provocative piece for The Atlantic that dealt, in good measure, with the rabbi shortage in American Judaism. So I asked her to do a Zoom event in which we talked about it. That event (sorry, “webinar”) is today at 3pm Eastern time, and about 800 people have already signed up. Want to join us? You can register here. We’d love to see you.
The woman who didn’t name a med school after herself
I have written elsewhere about the thorny question of giving money anonymously versus sticking your name on buildings, academic “chairs,” etc. I won’t rehash that conversation now, but let’s just say we should all applaud Ruth Gottesman for a) her extraordinary generosity in giving $1 billion to make Albert Einstein College of Medicine tuition-free, and b) for not making them take Einstein’s name off it. From the Times:
But it is a condition of Dr. Gottesman’s gift that the Einstein College of Medicine not change its name. Albert Einstein, the physicist who developed the theory of relativity, agreed to confer his name on the medical school, which opened in 1955.
The name, she noted, could not be beat. “We’ve got the gosh darn name — we’ve got Albert Einstein.”