Purim is the Israeli Halloween. Pop-up costume shops appear in the weeks ahead, children dress up for school and hamantaschen are as ubiquitous as mini Snickers bars. But there’s a darker side to the holiday, too. The Purim story is a tale of revenge. After Esther and Mordechai foil Haman’s plot to kill the Jews,…
TEL AVIV — Why are Israeli Orthodox Jews more attracted to politically extremist views than their non-Orthodox fellow citizens? The question is not a provocation. It’s one that grows out of a new analysis of data from the Pew Research Center’s study in March showing that nearly half of all Israeli Jews want Arabs expelled…
A mosque in the West Bank near Bethlehem was set on fire and nationalist slogans were painted on its walls. The attack in the Jaba village occurred early Wednesday morning. A window of the mosque was broken and something burning was thrown inside. Worshippers who arrived at the mosque at 4:30 a.m. saw the flames…
Right-wing activist Baruch Marzel wipes his eyes at the grave of Baruch Goldstein. / Getty Images These days, you can order almost anything by phone. Books. Movies. Food. Sex. Salvation? Sure, why not. Salvation. And not just any old kind, but the kind you can only get by virtue of an appeal to one of…
Esther denouncing Haman / Ernest Normand These days, many liberal Jews think of Purim as a play date for the kids and a night of drunken debauchery for the grown-ups. We think of costumes and songs and noisemakers, a kind of carnival spirit. But the levity with which we approach Purim is actually pretty astonishing….
France’s Jewish Defense League has published a eulogy of Baruch Goldstein which celebrates a massacre he perpetrated against Palestinian worshipers in Hebron 20 years ago. The group, known locally as Ligue de Defense Juive or LDJ, posted the eulogy on its website ahead of the Feb. 25 anniversary of the massacre during which Goldstein, a…
Two weirdly similar articles showed up in my email this morning. Both are by political activists who don’t particularly regard themselves as political activists but as voices of reason. Both ran into intrusive law enforcement, in the name of national security, that violated the freedoms each one values—freedom of inquiry in one case, freedom of…
William Saletan, a columnist at Slate.com, wrote a piece September 29 titled “The Ground Zero Synagogue: Should Jews build a synagogue near a site of Jewish terrorism?” He compares the debate over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York to the building of a new synagogue in Kiryat Arba, just outside Hebron,…
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