A bunch of eager, energetic religious folks want to move together into a Tel Aviv neighborhood, volunteer in the schools, open a synagogue, teach adult ed, and organize public celebrations of holidays, all in hopes of making their new neighbors a bit more Jewish. Should they be stopped or saluted?
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The Prime Ministers of Israel and Poland issue a joint declaration about WWII, asserting that Poles mostly treated Jews benignly. Historians of the Holocaust express outrage. And, anyway, should Israel’s Prime Minister be signing agreements about what’s true and false in Jewish History?
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We discuss 1) whether calling the flaming kites from Gaza “terror kites” distorts and cheapens the word “terror”, 2) the controversy over a musical featuring songs by Eyal Golan, accused of having consensual sex with underaged girls, and 3) whether we need “secular politics” that advance a “secular agenda” in Israel’s upcoming local elections.
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An activist spends long hours going over videos of rabbinic lectures, getting the sexist and homophobic bits on the nightly news. Is this smart progressive politics, or kind of creepy stalking?
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Dr. Martina Weisz, a research fellow at the Hebrew University’s Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, discusses the place of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial project, which started immediately after the momentous expulsion of the Jews from these countries, in the late 15th century.
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A new ultra-Orthodox Wikipedia serves up the world from a “Torah Perspective,” without pics of chicks, and light on evolution. A step towards or away from enlightenment?
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