A simple exchange between friends recently captured a dilemma at the heart of our age. Two people were debating global affairs when I interrupted and asked, half playfully, if they had managed to solve the world’s problems. Their answer was…
Category: Other
-
Turning AI Power Toward Human Purpose
-
What They’re Talking About When They Talk About the Intifada
As my mother was dying in America, growing weaker month by month, the flowers out on our porch were dying, too. It couldn’t be helped. It was Israel’s sabbatical year. By Jewish law, the earth lay fallow. I couldn’t weed them, couldn’t drown them…
Continue Reading
-
Stain Power and More Zevachim 97-99
97 — Knife to Meet You: The Akeidah’s Cutting Insight Our Gemara on Amud Beis quotes a proof text that a knife must be used to slaughter the Olah sacrifice: “Slaughtering may be performed only with a knife and not with a sharp stone or…
Continue Reading
-
Yemenite Hebrew: The Sound Time Forgot
For more than two millennia, the Jews of Yemen preserved the closest living pronunciation to Biblical Hebrew, untouched by European reforms or later rabbinic standardization. Their isolation — enforced by geography and by Islamic restrictions…
Continue Reading
-
Aspirin for Amnesia in Austria
We all know the slogan, “In case of risks and adverse effects, read the package insert and ask your doctor or pharmacist.” But last month in Vienna I ended up with unsolicited advice when trying to pick up some blood pressure medicine. I was…
Continue Reading
-
What Indiana Jones teaches about antizionism
Bringing a Sword to a Gunfight: Antizionism, Replacement Memory, and the Strategic Failure of Israel Advocacy In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones faces off against a skilled swordsman in a crowded Shuk. When the Arab man performs an…
Continue Reading
-
From Caracas to Cairo: Why a US–Venezuela Clash Hits the MENA Countries
A confrontation between the United States and Venezuela would be sold as a hemispheric morality play: sanctions, sovereignty, oil, and the familiar promise that pressure will eventually produce reform. For the Middle East and North Africa,…
Continue Reading
-
May I Speak to My Chosen People?
I speak as an outsider. A wandering Jewess. One who belongs everywhere and nowhere at once. One who did not grow up wrapped in certainty, but in questions. And yet — Jeremiah lives in my bones. So I ask, humbly but unapologetically: May I speak…
Continue Reading
-
The Dangers of Populist Politics: Zohran Mamdani
In an election cycle swept by a blue wave, Zohran Mamdani is surfing the crest. Mayor-elect Mamdani, as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, is New York City’s most openly socialist mayor. However, despite being the Democratic…
Continue Reading
-
The night Colonel Kemp came to visit my IDF unit on Hannukah in Gaza
Last year, during Hanukkah, on the Gaza front, a profound moment of unity and inspiration transpired when Col. Richard Kemp CBE, a distinguished figure with a storied military background, stood alongside my IDF unit to light the candles. As we…
Continue Reading