Every Thursday morning, I join about 30 of my friends for a breakfast meeting (sometimes live and sometimes on Zoom) where one of us makes a presentation on a topic of our own choice. This morning, my friend Ed Kopf talked about Chicago, where he and his wife, who live here in Washington, also maintain a Lake Shore Drive apartment. The presentations are always good, but sometimes – like this morning – they are better than that.

Today, Ed concentrated on the development of Chicago through the 19th century. He is going to give the second part of his presentation sometime in April. Will there be a third part? Perhaps. Ed, who started his life as a professor of American history, knows just how to organize a talk of this type. It couldn’t have been better.

So, what did he concentrate on today? He started with Frank Sinatra’s My Kind of Town, and then went into Carl Sandberg’s poetry. He told how the population of the city, which was founded in the 1830s, increased by almost 10 fold from the Civil War to the turn of the century, eclipsing Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Baltimore and St. Louis, which were larger cities at the start of that period. He talked about Chicago’s geographic position, how the Great Lakes and canal development enabled Chicago to transport goods to the east, how the inventions by entrepreneurs headquartered in Chicago enabled the vast increase in agricultural efficiency throughout the mid-west, how the development of the railroads further enabled goods to be delivered east, including meat products which were produced at the city’s slaughterhouses.

What will come next? Architecture? Culture? Baseball? Education? We will wait and see. Ed made it clear that Chicago has its share of problems, but they aren’t going to be addressed in this series of talks. He is clearly going to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. We will see about Mr. In-between.

It’s too bad that last night’s Haberman Institute program on the Jews of North Africa during World War II is one of the few Haberman programs that, for copyright reasons was unable to be recorded. Professor Sarah Abrevaya Stein of UCLA, author of books on the subject, did an excellent job covering a lot of ground. The Italian administration in Libya, the French Vichy administration of Algeria and Morocco, the brief German occupation of Tunisia. Work camps and prison camps all throughout the area (no death camps, but plenty of death) and the overall effect of the war on the 500,000 Jews of the southern Mediterranean countries was discussed in some detail. Egypt, never Fascist occupied, was not part of her lecture.

There has been much more concentration on the Jews of Europe than the Jews of North Africa during this period, but there are now a number of scholars working on various aspects of the North African experience, and there have been a number of memoirs written (some published, some not) by those who lived through this period. A very good presentation enjoyed about most of the approximately 200 people who registered for the talk.

By the way (did I say this before), Rabbi Lauren Tuchman’s excellent talk about how the Jewish texts deal with persons with disabilities, and how Jews with disabilities fare today, is now available on the Haberman website under Program Recordings. (www.habermaninstitute.org.) Rabbi Tuchman, who lives here in Washington, is, she believes, the first blind woman ordained into the rabbinate.

Today for me will be devoted to working on my presentation for next Thursday on the Israeli Supreme Court conflict, from an (not always well informed) American perspective.