The night Whitney Houston died, I made a joke on Twitter about the Jewish media finding an angle to the diva’s death; because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it is that the Jewish media will always find the Jewish connection to a story.

Thankfully the great Rachel Shukert saw my tweet, and was the one to answer the call.  

The school year of 1992 was a time of great schism in popular music. It was also my bat mitzvah year, which meant that practically every weekend was another opportunity to view this seismic rift in teen culture in action, made all the more toxic by the fact that we were growing up in Omaha, in a Jewish community that was not so much “tight-knit” as crafted from a single, unbroken fiber.

Another example of why Rachel’s column at Tablet is one of my favorite things to read these days.