On 2 May 2008, Cyclone Nargis hit Burma, first attacking the southern part of Irrawaddy Division, then passing through Rangoon (Yangon) and the delta areas. In its wake, the cyclone left 133,000 people dead or missing. According to the United Nations, 2.4 million people required emergency aid, but five weeks after the storm, there were people still suffering.

Fortunately for me, I was living in New York, working for the American Jewish Congress. My family in Rangoon was not so fortunate, and they had to endure several hours of intense rain and wind as the storm made its way across Burma.

Everything about Dror Cohen says winner: his athletic ability, his drive, his intelligence, his natural charm and his good looks. This gold medal winner is truly larger than life.

And he is confined to a wheelchair. When speaking with Dror about his accomplishments, this fact can somehow become a footnote, an afterthought. It is his character and soul that soar despite his handicap.

But in his words, “it is in the small moments” that the reality of his situation hits- like trying to navigate down a crowded driveway in a wheelchair in order to hail a taxi cab or his inability to pick up his toddler nephew and toss him into the air. This is how he expresses having to “wake up and again realise what you have lost.”

Deborah Lipstadt has stood up in court in defense of history and truth. She has experienced what she explains to be the “world of difference between reading about anti-Semitism and hearing it up close and personal.”

Just days before meeting with Deborah Lipstadt, the latest scandal in junk memoirs broke that went to the core of the very issue that Deborah Lipstadt has gained international recognition for – the fi ght to save the integrity of history and historical record. While there has already been far too much attention given to Misha Defonseca (Monique De Wael) and her preposterous saga, this is exactly the type of incident that keeps historians, like Deborah Lipstadt fi ghting for the defense of truth and history.

Rabbi Marvin Tokayer continues to travel on unknown roads that reveal the history of our people in Asia. He has traveled many miles from his birthplace in Brooklyn, New York, from West to East and back again countless times on the most unusual journey.

Following his study at the Jewish Theological Seminary of American and his Orthodox Rabbinic ordination in 1962, he enlisted in the United States Air Force as he was informed that, unlike the draftees, he would be able to choose his base. So Europe he chose and to Japan he was sent.