The culture we live in nowadays is one of lies. The truth is that it has always been thus even if at certain stages, the lies have been more venal and destructive than others. Ancient monarchs swore to defend and protect their citizens and promised victory when they knew they had neither the capacity nor the intention of doing so.…
Author: Jeremy Rosen
Missing Children
One of the darkest episodes in the history of Israel is the ghastly story of the missing children of poor immigrants from Arab lands, airlifted to Israel (on the Wings of Eagles project) in the early years of State . Suddenly Israel had to cope with a massive influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from very poor and often isolated communities. It…
Freedom
The New York Review of Books has recently devoted a lot of space to a review of “The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King” by Peniel E. Joseph. In the current context of Black slavery and its ramifications, I found some interesting parallels (and differences) between the Jewish and the American Black…
Who is a Jew?
Why is there such a fuss over the Israeli Supreme Court’s decision to allow converts to Judaism, as defined by the Reform and Conservative movements, to qualify for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return? It makes no sense to me at all. It is a conflation of two quite separate issues, the Civil Law of the State of Israel and…
Mr. Cohen of Ballachulish Ferry
A week ago, I gave a Zoom talk for the Scottish Jewish Archive center. I spoke about my experiences as the rabbi of the largest Jewish Congregation in Scotland, the Giffnock and Newlands Hebrew Congregation, between 1968 and 1971. It was my first full-time position as a rabbi after I returned from my studies in Jerusalem, and it was an amazing…
1848
The course of human civilization, if one can use that term, has progressed and continues to, in a series of slow cycles. The German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) introduced the now well-known process of change. A thesis, a positive step forward in human affairs that always provokes an antithesis, a reaction, a step backward. Then comes a synthesis, the fusion of the two…