Tisha B’Av was a day of contradictions and commemoration of destructions, ending, as it should, in hope. Not Hallmark Card hope. Real hope. The point of it all.
It began with the story of a colleague’s mother, killed in the bombing of the Jewish Community Center of Buenos Aires in 1994. Told […]
The Israeli radio that I’m listening to this morning is playing Leonard Cohen and Elliot Smith for Tisha B’Av. It’s fitting for the clash of civilizations that is contemporary Israel.
Last night we went to the Tayelet in Talpiot for a Tisha B’Av evening service and reading of Lamentations, marking the Destruction of […]
Israeli Knesset Member Michael Melchior came to speak with the American and Israeli Fellows on Sunday, in an enthusiastic, hopeful and energetic expression of ideas that essentially claimed that what will save the Jewish people from dissolution into an orthodox sect will be pluralistic education.
For Melchior, Zionism sees its ultimate realization in its dream to […]
If I’m repeating myself, I’m sorry: it must be my age.
But these Israeli Bnai Mitzvahs are “the bomb.”
Completely unpretentious, sincere, and focused on exactly what they are: a kid reading from Torah, chanting Haftarah, and talking about it.
I’ve sat through two of them so far at Kehilat Kol Ha Neshama, the Reform movement’s […]
A couple of Israeli friends have demonstrated an extraordinary amount of courage this week by inviting a Sudanese refugee family from Darfur into their Jerusalem home.
As many of you may have been reading, a number of Sudanese refugees have made it to Israel’s border and into the country during the past couple of years, leaving […]
At a kumzitz Israeli style dinner in the parking lot of Nahal Amud last night in the Meron mountain range, with the sliver of the moon of Av hanging in sky next to a bright and illuminating Venus, one of the Israeli teenagers turned to me and said, “Who’s that big American Jew who said […]
From AB Yehoshua’s talk at a hotel in Caesaria, we were off to two of my favorite archaeological sites in the country, the Beit Shearim Cemetery Caves and Tzippori, one of the early synagogue centers in the Galilee following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD.
The three experiences–the contemporary writer, the burial caves, […]
If Etgar Keret’s message to the Fellows was one of deconstruction, humor, and inside-outside status, AB Yehoshua, whom the Fellows met the next day, was very much Old School: epic, challenging, and, ideological.
He was humorous, too–don’t get me wrong. Like when he opened up his remarks with the line, “the baseline definition of […]
The weather changes quickly when you go from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Dry desert air gives way to the damp mugginess; but ironically, a heaviness lifts and Tel Aviv exudes a slightly more carefree quality. It’s been said before; but this time along, my kids noticed it too, so it made for a […]
Walking on Ethiopia Street yesterday, in the shade of the great Ethiopia Church, we stood across from Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s house. Ben Yehuda is known as the “founder of modern Hebrew,” having lived from 1858 to 1922, first in Lithuania and then in Palestine, where he came having been profoundly influeneced by the events […]