Daniel Treiman
By Daniel Treiman
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Life Former Jewish Agency Chief Avraham Burg Rejects Idea of a ‘Jewish State’
Former Knesset speaker and ex-head of the Jewish Agency Avraham Burg has sparked quite a brouhaha with a recent interview in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz. Among other things, he said that “to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It’s dynamite.” Ha’aretz’s…
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Life A Rabbi in the Batcave
What is it with rabbis and superheroes? First, there was Rabbi Simcha Weinstein’s “Up Up and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History Culture and Values Shaped The Comic Book Superhero.” Now, the New Jersey Jewish News tells us about Batman aficionado Rabbi Cary Friedman and his book, “Wisdom from the Batcave: How to Live a Super…
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Life Aussie Prankster Finds Club That Won’t Have Him as a Member: The KKK
On his new Sundance show “John Safran vs. God,” John Safran travels to America to join the Ku Klux Klan. But he finds it’s not easy convincing a KKK Grand Dragon to admit a Jew, no matter how non-practicing or self-loathing he may profess to be. My favorite part of their exchange: SAFRAN: Wasn’t there…
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Life A Casualty of the Six Day War: Judaism
In a withering j’accuse, Ha’aretz’s Bradley Burston makes the case that “while the Jewish state survived the war, Judaism as we knew it — Orthodox Judaism in particular — did not.” Burston writes: If absolute occupation corrupts absolutely, no group would be more corrupted by Israel’s presence in the territories than rightist rabbis. Of course,…
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Life Six Day War Caused Sexual Impotence, Price Hikes
The Associated Press looks at the lingering psychic wounds in the Arab world from the 1967 Six Day War: Egyptian columnist Wael Abdel Fattah wrote in the independent weekly Al-Fagr newspaper that Arabs blame the defeat for “everything” — from “price hikes, dictatorship, religious extremism, sectarian strife, even sexual impotence.” “A military defeat, that could…
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Life Don’t Worry, Ahmadinejad Only Wants Israel ‘Wiped From the Pages of Time’
Bintel Blog reader James Holstun objects to an earlier post of mine in which I quoted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Holstun writes: I know that this is a widespread accusation — it’s on THE WEB, after all, so it must be true! But people…
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Film & TV Borat in Rehab, Eva Mendes’s Jew Fetish and Other Tales From the MTV Movie Awards
For one night, at least, MTV may as well have been the Jewish Television Network. Yesterday’s MTV Movie Awards had an unusually large number of young, hip celebrity Jews taking center-stage. The show was hosted by comedian-of-the-moment Sarah Silverman, who, in typical faux-innocent fashion, mercilessly roasted Paris Hilton (conveniently in attendance). Silverman noted — to…
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Life The Rebbe and the Shoah
There have long been those within ultra-Orthodox Jewry who regarded the Holocaust as divine punishment for what they saw as the sins of the Jews: Zionism, liberalism, irreligiosity, religiosity they disliked, etc. Most recently, former Israeli chief Sephardic rabbi, Mordecai Eliyahu, placed the blame for the Nazi genocide on Reform Judaism. According to a respected…
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