Stick an average alumnus of the Israeli public school system into a synagogue during morning prayers, and chances are they would be bewildered. Even if they could recollect an arid Bible class they had to endure long ago, what good would it do them? They'd still be lost.
The holiday of Tu Bishvat ("the fifteenth of Shvat") falls this year on Wednesday, February 8. What are its origins, and when and why did it become incorporated into the calendar as the Jewish "Arbor Day"?
Eric Nelson is a danger to academia. You would not think so from his background. He is the Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University. He has had a proper education, at Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Imagine God not as a benign force infusing the universe with love and sustaining it with mercy, and not as a stern judge smiting sinners from on high with his cosmic zap-gun, but as a grandfatherly figure, kind but, truth be told, somewhat out of it, sitting in a corner, tolerant of the various paths his children have chosen.
Elhanan Yakira, professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has all the credentials of a man of the Israeli Left: born and raised in Tel Aviv as a Zionist and socialist , a lifelong secular Jew, an opponent of West Bank settlements, an advocate of government intervention in economic policy. Yet many of his colleagues on the Left denounce him as a right-winger and a traitor.
Aryeh Tepper
Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) was the poet of Jewish national rebirth and a leading light of cultural Zionism. To be more precise, he was a power station. Composing poems, writing essays, founding journals, raising up the sparks of Israel's past, Bialik became an essential source of energy for Jewish cultural revival.
Ruth R. Wisse
It was bound to happen. Abraham Sutzkever, born July 15, 1913, in Smorgon, Lithuania, one of the great poets of the twentieth century and the last towering figure of modern Yiddish literature, died this Wednesday, January 20, in Tel Aviv, where he had lived since 1947. A descendant of rabbis, Sutzkever applied to the writing of poetry the standards of refinement that his ancestors had practiced in obedience to Jewish religious law. During World War II, when he was herded into the ghetto with the rest of Vilna Jewry, he determinedly continued composing, persuaded that "the angel of poetry" protects the creator of timeless—but only of truly timeless—work.
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