Purim is the happiest and craziest day in the Jewish calendar and the only festival that celebrates an event in the Diaspora. But is it really? According to tradition, the story of Purim and the Book of Esther date to the early Persian period somewhere in the 5th century BCE. The story is of a naïve, drunken, male chauvinist, incompetent Persian…
Author: Jeremy Rosen
Darkness
It is almost a year since we first got an inclining of the disastrous Covid19. No one, not even the holy World Health Organization had any idea of how serious it was or how it would spread with it so much death, pain, and gloom. There has been a lot of talk of darkness. If it were just uncertainty, one…
The greatest rabbi in the West
In the latest edition of the Brooklyn Jewish journal Hakirah, there is a fascinating article on Rav Joseph Ber Soloveitchik (1903 -1993) by David. P. Goldman entitled The Rav’s Uncompleted Grand Design. Goldman himself is a Renaissance man. An economist, a musicologist, an expert on China, a columnist as Spengler, a scholar. But this blog is not about him. It is about JB,…
Louis Jacobs
Any Anglo Jew from the 1960s will be familiar with the “Jacobs Affair” that divided the Jewish community more than any other religious debate in its history. There were other conflicts, between Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Reform and Traditional. But none as bitter or as lasting as this. I was a teenager when it all began, but it had a profound…
Hard-hearted
My last blog was intentionally controversial. The aim was to point out that people rarely seem capable of hearing, let alone absorbing another point of view. Some of my readers only read or misread what confirmed their previous standpoint. We seem conditioned to listen to what we want to hear. I get accused by the right of being left and by…
The Cuckoo Coup
What a year America has had. To add to the scourge of Covid19, we have seen the self-destruction of a President and we are witnessing a serious degradation in the values of American society. There is no humility, no grace, no dignity, and no sense of humanity. It is an era of lies, distortion, avatars, selfies, selfishness, fake identities and…