Mir Yeshivah today is probably the largest and most famous yeshivah in the world, with some 6,000 students scattered over numerous campuses and buildings. Its head, Rabbi Natan Tzvi Finkel, died recently, and tens of thousands turned out for his funeral. Yet most of the Jewish world, and certainly the non-Jewish world, have no idea who he or Mir is.…
General Topics
The Chosen
I cannot begin to tell you how much I dislike the expression “The Chosen People”. It is not that I have any problem with what the Bible says. To me it is the most essential text (and also its Talmudic expansion). But the fact is that some of its ideas and laws have fallen by the wayside, even as it…
Jewish Writers
In 1970, when I was living in Glasgow, a close friend suggested I read Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. I went right out and bought it. But to my chagrin I just could not get through it. I agree that Bellow is a more accomplished writer than say Philip Roth, whose Portnoy’s Complaint came out a year before and was…
Hitchens Was Wrong
I enjoy reading Christopher Hitchens, the Anglo-American gadfly journalist, even when he gets it completely wrong. Here is an example. In his autobiography, Hitch-22, this is what he says about Israel: “Suppose a man leaps out of a burning building…and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now make that burning building Europe and the luckless man the Palestinian…
The Wall Street Protests
The phenomenon of the demonstrations around Wall Street and elsewhere seems to have taken everyone by surprise. I applaud demonstrations against corruption, unfair trading, and excesses, particularly where they benefit a small elite at the expense of the majority. Protest is our ancient prophetic tradition. I know they will get nowhere. They will fizzle out. But the principle of decrying…
Gilad Shalit
In 1286 the greatest rabbi of his time, Meir of Rothenburg, was on his way to the Land of Israel. As life had become so unbearable in the Rhineland as the Crusades swept through and brought wave after wave of Jew hatred in their wake, like many Jews of the time, he wanted to make a new life for himself…