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Free Speech

In my youth, I always regarded free, reasoned, civilized speech to be one of the most important and positive features of Western societies. My education, at school, university, and beyond was always predicated on the freedom of expression and listening to another point of view. Almost as important was that you could laugh at and make fun of ideas you thought…

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Self Defense

Elliot Horowitz in his overview of Purim over the ages, Reckless Rites and the Legacy of Jewish Violence has a subtext. It is a quote from the English poet W.H. Auden “ Those to whom evil is done, Do evil in return.” And Purim he suggests is an example of this. He documents Christian and Jewish ( liberal and reform) disapproval of…

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Why Purim Matters

Purim matters so much this year. It tells a never ending story. We were threatened with destruction. We responded by finding ways to combat the threat.  We did not capitulate. We called out evil as it was. We celebrated our survival by emphasizing charity, friendship, and gratitude, strengthening our communities, all positive qualities, building not destroying. We did not rejoice in…

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Who Was Job?

One of my earliest and happiest memories and the first play I ever attended, was The Story of Job performed at Carmel College in 1953. It was written and directed by the brilliant multi-talented Murray Roston (he also taught us how to identify bird songs and imitate them). He soon moved to Israel and had a distinguished career at Bar Ilan University where he is…

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Here We Go Again

Anti-Judaism was always driven by two, agents, religion, and politics. And so it is today. Nowadays it stems mainly from the unholy and contradictory alliance between Islamism and the Marxist depiction of Jews as wealthy oppressors. It was the same story in England with different actors long ago. The Jews were expelled from England by Edward the 1st in 1290 as a…

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Palmyra Tadmor

Many years ago, in Israel, I and my family, stayed at a rather drab Government Hotel in Herzliya called The Tadmor! It has now been taken over by a commercial company and spruced up. But the name remains and what a significant historical one it is. Palmyra or Tadmor is an ancient city, now in the center of modern Syria, that dates back thousands…

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