As South Africa goes to the polls to re-elect a corrupt, evil, disaster of a regime, one feels so sorry for those naïve idealists hoped for something better. Amongst them was a man I greatly admired. Chief Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz (1906-1984) who was Chief Rabbi in South Africa during the early part of the apartheid regime. Not only was he a charismatic…
Author: Jeremy Rosen
R. Akiva Winner or Loser?
Rebbi Akiva, born in 50 CE, was one of the greatest rabbis of the Talmud. He was also one of the most controversial. Against the opinion of most of his colleagues he supported the Bar Cochba revolution against Rome in 132 CE and thought that Bar Cochba was the Messiah. He ended up being tortured to death by the Romans. Today there is a…
Josephus Hero or Traitor
The man we know as Josephus (the Romans called him Flavius Josephus ), was an aristocratic Judean, born in Jerusalem in 37 CE and died in Rome somewhere around 100 CE. He was a highly controversial historical personality. His book The Antiquities of the Jews was the first history of the Jewish people after the Bible. It was written primarily for a Roman audience…
Zionism or Judaism
Yom or Chag HaAtzmaut is this coming week. I don’t give a toss for what the world thinks. For me, it is a day to celebrate. But there are issues worth dwelling on. Once that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism were two different pathologies. After all, on the right and the left, the secular, and the religious there have always been Jews who have opposed…
Holocaust Day
Next Monday we will observe our Yom HaShoah. We may hear the cliché “ Never again” and realize it means nothing to the majority of people in the so-called civilized world. We deluded ourselves into thinking that memorials, education, and world sympathy would protect us against another outbreak of Jew-hatred. I am not suggesting that all the demonstrators against Israel today…
Slavery Today
We tend to think of slavery as something belonging entirely to the past. On the Seder Night, we will talk about slavery going back thousands of years and think of it abstractly as a feature of a barbaric world long gone. We will be asked to imagine what it was like to be a slave and then imagine experiencing freedom from slavery.…