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…
Author: Jeremy Rosen
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.…
Ben Hecht
We Jews have always been a fractious, divided people, ever since the days of Moses. If we came together, it was to respond to an external threat, and even then, there was always dissension. And so, it is today. But such conditions produce the most unlikely heroes. It matters not to me if they come from the left or the…