Here is Michel Cohen, the winner of an Israeli children’s singing competition: www.mako.co.il/special-nrg/video/Video-5086aaa0a6a1431006.htm Just read the words. This is Israel: www.hebrewsongs.com/song-shirlashalom.htm For all the bad news we read about internal conflict in Israeli society, here is good and moving news about the spirit that still burns in its soul.
General Topics
Greek Wisdom
In the latest New York Review of Books, Mary Beard, a popular lecturer, blogger, and professor of classics at Cambridge University, bemoans the disappearance of the classics from Western schools. She is right. But can anything be done? I think not because of the materialist values of our secular world. When I was a schoolboy, Latin and Greek were essential…
Beit Shemesh Syndrome
At last there is outrage, even within their own circles, at the extreme ultra-Orthodox fanatics who think they can bully to achieve their aims. This kind of crude, religious anti-social behavior has been tolerated for too long. Let us hope now the line has been drawn. Some background. Fifty years ago in Israel there were only two ultra-Orthodox enclaves, Bnei Brak…
Chanukah Then and Now
The story of Chanukah we hear year in and year out is about the triumph of the gallant few Maccabee rebels against the might of the Syrian Greek Empire. There’s a political narrative and a religious narrative that seems as vivid, as relevant, and as disturbing now as it was then. The political narrative includes several elements. A small determined…
Hillary Clinton & Modesty
Hillary Clinton, bless her, chose to berate Israel at a closed conference recently for its attitudes towards women. She specifically mentioned segregated seating on buses serving Charedi neighborhoods and recent decisions limiting the role of women in the armed forces in combat. I’m not sure if her objection to recent moves that permit male soldiers to opt out of mixed…
Can Mir survive?
The Mir Yeshivah that I went to in the 1960s was an intimate place, as indeed was Jerusalem itself–still divided, and small enough so that everyone seemed to know everyone else. After the Six Day War it all changed. Suddenly Jerusalem opened up and the Old City was like a magnet that drew everyone into its secret passages and ancient…