Archive for April, 2009

Dear reader, I'm interested in what you think about Caryl Churchill's play "Seven Jewish Children."  Many people have said it's anti-Semitic.  Most of the people who claim it's anti-Semitic have not read the whole play.  They react on the basis of hearsay, or from reading a few lines.  You need to read the whole thing...
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Today at 11am I heard a siren go off. I hurriedly finished a phone call, opened my window so I could hear the siren better, and stood at silent attention.  From my office window on the 16th floor of the Technology Park in Jerusalem I could see  that traffic on the roads below had...
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"Kol hakavod" to the Western diplomats who walked out on Ahmadinejad's hate filled speech at the "Durban II" conference in Geneva.  As reported in Haaretz, dozens of Western diplomats walked out on the Iranian president when he started using the podium to engage in a racist tirade against Israel. There are those who say...
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Every time a I write a post that is critical of Israel -- like my most recent one on "Where were the rabbis for human rights in Egypt" -- I have one or two people "unsubscribe" from my mailing list.  As often as I'm critical of Israel, it's a wonder I have any subscribers...
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If you think about it, Passover is a very difficult holiday from a human rights perspective -- we have collective punishment, as in the plagues that punished every Egyptian, not just hard hearted Pharaoh, and we have what might be considered a "disproportionate response," the total annihilation of Pharaoh's charioteers in the Reed Sea....
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"They tried to kill us, we won, let's eat…"  According to the old joke, that's message of all Jewish holidays.  There is actually a lot more to Passover, and as part of our preparations for the holiday it is good to give thought to the meaning of the holiday and how it is celebrated....
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