Surveilling Rabbis
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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Surveilling Belligerents
Israel’s got a machine-learning AI system for identifying lone terrorists before they act. Should this bit of real-scifi-Minority Report-ism make it easier for us to sleep at night, or cause us to toss-and-turn in Orwellian angst?
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Judaism: The Theme Park
$400 million to build a theme park in the desert about Judaism, with a ride that log-flumes you through a hectic week and floats you past the serene and bucolic pleasures of Shabbat? Is Israel finally making Judaism fun?
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Show Me a Hero (and I’ll Write You a Tragedy)
Should Israel’s street names be scrubbed on honorific mentions of Ashkenazi founding fathers and mothers who treated Sefaradim/Mizrahim with condescension and worse?
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Worn Only Once, For Drinks at the King David
A new site lets rich Israelis offload their unworn couture to the hoi polloi, providing refined clothes to unrefined people. But isn’t this cloying bit of rich-kid entrepreneurship, actually a pretty good thing for the world?
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Wicked-pedia?
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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Won’t Anyone Think of the Poor Tour Guides?
Should Israel’s tour guides be licensed professionals, like gynecologists, or unregulated enthusiasts, like aromatherapists?
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The Truth, the Pole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth
Anyone claiming that Poles bear collective responsibility for Jews murdered in Poland during the Holocaust could land in jail for three years, according to a new Polish law. Now a delegation of Polish historians and politicians is in Israel trying to explain why the law is just. What’s a Jewish state to do?
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