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…
Lilith
There are many stories about evil spirits who are supposed to surround us and interfere in our lives. That’s one way of explaining evil in our world. Such ideas are still popular amongst the credulous and the superstitious. Most evil spirits are male, like Asmodeus. But the mistress of evil is Lilith. Queen of the night. The name comes from the Hebrew…
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…