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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What happened to good old summer camps when kids slept on rocks under stars and sang around campfires? Why have they yielded to space camp, video game camp and veterinary medicine camp?
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A new poll finds that Israeli right-wingers, who tend to be poorer than average, are optimistic about the country’s economic future, while Israeli left-wingers, who tend to be richer than average, are pessimistic. Was Netanyahu right when he said that leftists are just sour-pussed nattering nabobs of negativism?
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Labor Party Head Avi Gabbay pays shadowy consultants to post faux-Facebook pages trashing centrist rival Yair Lapid. Is Gabbay just a politician who is in it to win it, or is he yet another politician who has lost his soul?
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Should Israel’s government subsidize such quaint anachronisms as artisanal bread-baking and clothes-making, for the sake of preserving a once-beloved cultural heritage destroyed by the globalization, corporatization and factorization of pretty much everything?
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Former Labor head and present-day chair of the opposition, Yizhak “Bougie” Herzog, is elected to head the venerable, old Jewish Agency. But is the organization better off dead?
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Sara Netanyahu is indicted for charging taxpayers $100,000 for fancy take-out (while also charging the taxpayers for a full-time chef). Should the wife of a Prime Minister really stand trial for bilking the public coffers for cardboard cartons of comestibles?
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Should Jewish summer camps teach campers “the Palestinian narrative”? How do you communicate a complex and morally-alive picture of Israel and Zionism to open-hearted kids aged 7 to 17?
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Tel Aviv University doesn’t play Israel’s national anthem at graduation, out of respect for the feelings of Muslims and Christians. Is this self-abnegation, as some argue, or a brave step towards a more inclusive Israeli future?
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