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Though heir to a long tradition of Jews in politics, Joseph Lieberman was the first Jew to be nominated by a major party for national office in the United States. As Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000, he received more popular votes than his opponent, Dick Cheney. Lieberman's persona as an observant modern Orthodox Jew appealed to many at a time when religion was increasingly prominent in public life. Projecting an aura of wholesomeness, moderation, and congeniality, he was the Jew as mensch , a man who, like Arthur Miller's Biff, succeeds in American society by making himself "well-liked." He was continuously in awe of his own success at fulfilling the American dream of equal opportunity. But by 2004, when politics became more polarized and his bid for the presidency foundered, Lieberman's Jewishness seemed irrelevant and his moderation a liability.

The lunisolar Jewish calendar is an example par excellence of "time engineering." It is based on the relation between the mean period of the lunar motion about the earth and the mean period of the earth about the sun (the tropical year). This relation is that, to six places of decimals, the number of days in 19 tropical years is equal to the number of days in 235 lunar cycles and is known as the metonic cycle. Moreover, the Jewish calendar, unlike our civil calendar, for example, is intertwined with the days of the week by virtue of the first day of Tishri (Rosh Hashanah) being allowed—for religious reasons—only to occur on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Because the metonic-cycle relation is not exact, there will eventually be a significant seasonal drift in holidays such as Passover unless the calendar construction is modified appropriately.