I was born in the ancient Palestinian city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank in a home around the corner from the entrance to Shuhada Street, the main thoroughfare and marketplace in the city. The name of our neighborhood was Bab el-Khan. Today, hanging on the stone walls of my old Bab el-Khan neighborhood…
The anti-Trump left has become the great defender of Jews the world over. This is at least what Jewish progressives want you to believe. But if you look closely, the kind of thought policing coming from those corners clashes with the moral authority they claim to possess. In the preachy, Jew-shaming that has become all…
Just past the display of coffins from 13th-century BCE that once belonged to military legend and antiquities obsessive Moshe Dayan, a remarkable new exhibit of Roman coins at The Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, feels strangely contemporary. Before magazine covers, television shows, “fireside chats,” Twitter, and, of course, Donald Trump, coins were a method of asserting…
It was Wednesday morning of finals week. The thought of waking up at 5:30 AM was not the most thrilling of thoughts; but, Rosh Chodesh aligns with the cycle of the moon, not with the cycle of my school year. I had committed to welcoming in Elul at the Kotel with my Hebrew Union College-Jewish…
It was a Thursday evening in the winter, and the sun was sinking as I waited at a bus stop in Givat Shaul, practicing to chant my Torah reading from photocopied sheets of paper. Moses was late in coming down the mountain, and the bus was late in coming to our part of Jerusalem, so…
Several days after the First Zionist Congress concluded in 1897, Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism, assessed its effect in his diary. “At Basel, I founded the Jewish State,” he wrote, referring to the Swiss site of the meeting. “If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps…
While watching the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia – the violence that erupted between marching neo-Nazis and Antifa protesters – I can’t help but think back to what was the original “Antifa”, a group of Jews, whom my father told me about from his childhood, growing up as a poor Jewish kid in Newark, New…
In a well-lit basement room in the East Jerusalem neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah, a group of kids and adults are standing in a circle tossing a ball. This group is made up of seventh graders — Muslim, Christian and Jewish — all residents of Jerusalem; their parents and counselors are also present. I am in the…
ייִדיש־רעדער אין שטעט איבער דער וועלט קענען קריגן שטיצע צו פֿאַרברענגען פּנים־אל־פּנים אויף ייִדיש מיט אַנדערע ייִדיש־קענער
100% of profits support our journalism
