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Israel & the Near East


What Would Ben-Gurion Do? What Would Ben-Gurion Do?
Thursday, May 19, 2011 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

How would David Ben-Gurion handle himself if he were the one scheduled to meet Barack Obama on May 20 and address a joint session of the U.S. Congress a few days later? That hypothetical question has been aired frequently by Israelis in the run-up to Benjamin Netanyahu's pending appointments in Washington.
The Life of Prayer The Life of Prayer
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Prayer has never been easy, as the Psalmist well knew: "For there is no word on my tongue; You, O Lord, know them all" (139: 4). And even if there are words on the tongue, the results can be distressingly uncertain, or worse: "My God, I call out by day and You do not answer; by night, there is no respite for me" (22:2). It hasn’t gotten easier since then.
Mimouna! Mimouna!
Friday, May 13, 2011 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

What did two million Israelis do when Passover ended this year? As in previous years, they celebrated Mimouna, a Moroccan Jewish holiday that is popularly observed by picnicking, barbecueing, and consuming moufletas (sweet North African pancakes). And what is Mimouna all about? No one really knows.
Agitprop in America Agitprop in America
Thursday, May 12, 2011 by Alex Joffe | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The tempest has subsided, and the playwright Tony Kushner will receive his honorary doctorate from the City University of New York after all. After a single trustee convinced the majority of his fellow board members to deny the award on the basis of Kushner's viciously negative pronouncements about Israel, the weight of almost the entire New York cultural apparatus was brought to bear.
Beyond “Religious” and “Secular” Beyond “Religious” and “Secular”
Wednesday, May 11, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

What should be the place of the Jewish religion in a Jewish state? There are many putative answers to this question, and the answers have changed over time. When Zionism was still an aspiration, a great blank yet to be filled in, the terms of debate were set by a self-confidently secular dispensation preoccupied with state- and institution-building. In the first few decades of statehood, religion, though state-established, was clearly subservient.
Israel: The Miracle Israel: The Miracle
Tuesday, May 10, 2011 by Paul Johnson | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The state of Israel is the product of more than 4,000 years of Jewish history. "If you want to understand our country, read this!" said David Ben-Gurion on the first occasion I met him, in 1957. And he slapped the Bible. But the creation and survival of Israel are also very much a 20th-century phenomenon.
The New Egypt: Back to Belligerence? The New Egypt: Back to Belligerence?
Thursday, May 5, 2011 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Watching Egypt's revolution unfold earlier this year, apprehensive Israelis were reassured by European and American observers that they had little to worry about: Hosni Mubarak's February 12 departure had been provoked neither by anti-Israel fury nor by Islamist fervor, and shouts of "Up with Egypt" in Tahrir Square more than drowned out chants of "Down with Israel" or "Allahu Akbar." 
Do Israeli and American Jews Need Each Other? Do Israeli and American Jews Need Each Other?
Friday, April 29, 2011 by Yehudah Mirsky | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Starting in 2005, American readers of the Israeli daily Haaretz noticed something new in its pages: well-informed, jaunty analyses not only of American politics and diplomacy but of American Jews and American Judaism. The paper's correspondent was clearly a native-born Israeli, but, in decidedly un-Israeli fashion, he not only was genuinely interested in understanding American Jewry from within but regularly had insightful things to say about it.
Loving the Jews Loving the Jews
Thursday, April 28, 2011 by Aryeh Tepper | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Five years before Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State in 1896, an American Methodist lay leader named William Blackstone dreamed of the Jewish people's returning to their ancestral homeland and rebuilding their ancient country. Blackstone translated his dream into a petition signed by 400 prominent Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the speaker of the House of Representatives, and a future president, William McKinley.
How the Likud Came to Be How the Likud Came to Be
Friday, April 22, 2011 by Elliot Jager | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Benjamin Netanyahu no doubt took comfort from a recent survey showing that 76 percent of Likud members opposed annexing all of Judea and Samaria. Yet he would also have known that 10,000 party recruits had been newly signed up by uncompromising settler leaders. How to keep the Likud ("Union") together and in the center of Israel's political mainstream?
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Editors' Picks
Building Bridges Noam Dvir, Haaretz. Moshe Safdie, the world-renowned Israeli architect, is shutting down the office he opened in Jerusalem in 1970. The future, it seems, is in China.
Mincing Words Philologos, Forward. The Yiddish expression makhn ash un blote—"to make ashes and mud" or "to make mincemeat" of someone—exemplifies the influence of biblical idiom on Yiddish phraseology.
Creaming the Competition Elli Fischer, Jerusalem Post. Ruling Haagen Dazs ice cream to be non-kosher, the Israeli chief rabbinate misconstrues Moshe Feinstein's position and once again demonstrates its contempt for Diaspora Judaism.
Vatican't Giulio Meotti, Ynet. Israel's decision to cede some sovereignty over the "Hall of the Last Supper" to the Catholic Church will only embolden the Vatican's campaign to appropriate Jewish Jerusalem.
A Separate Peace Tamar Rotem, Haaretz. A Gur Hasid, who practices a strict sexual separation, will not walk with his wife on the street. He will not call her by name. To address her, he will knock on the table. Or hum.
Disjecta Membra Benjamin Balint, Los Angeles Review of Books. Not for nothing was the Cairo Genizah called "the Living Sea Scrolls": its discoverers revolutionized the study of Mediterranean Jewish life at the very moment that it was drawing to a close.
Reading the Netanyahu Tea Leaves Zvika Krieger, Atlantic. Does the collapse of recent Israeli-Palestinian exploratory talks mask an increased flexibility in the Prime Minister's position on Israeli control of the Jordan Valley? The Atlantic is hopeful.
Barter in Bartaa Tali Heruti-Sover, Haaretz. Straddling the Green Line, the village of Bartaa has become a booming market town. Or, rather, the Palestinian half has.
Ardor, or Architecture Yonatan Silverman, Jerusalem Post. The holiness of Jerusalem in the Muslim tradition owes less to the Koran than it does to the opportunistic building program of Jerusalem's eight-century Umayyad rulers.
Who's Afraid of a Nuclear Iran? Douglas Murray, YouTube. Israel is—and since 1973, Israel has had reason to think that on the brink of its annihilation, Europe wouldn't act to save it. (Video)