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Every time you go to a polling place to cast your vote or every time you are given maternity leave paid for by the government; and every time you take a day off to do errands or receive income support during a pandemic – try and remember that those benefits should not be taken for granted. And try and show your gratitude. Granted, there is still a lot to improve and repair. However, when looking back at human history, in all that concerns social benefits we are “standing on the shoulders of giants.” That was how the great Isaac Newton[…]

A few weeks ago I came across a BBC debate that had been held between the former Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, the late Jonathan Sacks zt”l, and the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins. It was a fascinating war of words between two intellectual powerhouses: one of the participants was the spiritual father of scientific atheism, who devoted his life to assaulting G-d and creationism, and the other was one of the greatest Jewish theologians of all times, who devoted his life to defending G-d and faith. Apart from the mesmerizing subject matter itself, it was[…]

“On December 27, 1955, a naval court martial in Israel sentenced the soldier Eliahu Itzkovitz to three months in prison after being tried for desertion.” That report was provided by the military correspondent for the daily newspaper Herut on May 21, 1959, after it was cleared for publication four years after the event. The brief item added that Itzkovitz “had abandoned his post for 840 days, from July 6, 1953 to October 24, 1955.” According to the item in the newspaper, a few weeks prior to the trial Itzkovitz came to the Israeli Embassy in Paris of his own volition,[…]

“What are the Jewish geniuses up to,” pondered the distinguished American philosopher, William James, as he witnessed throngs of Jewish immigrants crowding into the Lower East Side in Manhattan, New York in the late 19th century. James was a visionary. The interaction between tens of thousands of Jews from villages in the Pale of Settlement – who had suffered centuries of discrimination – and the values of liberty and equality espoused in the land of unlimited possibilities ultimately led to the incredible success story of American Jewry. A group of intellectual powerhouses – authors, literary critics, philosophers, journalists and researchers[…]

A few months before his tragic death, the circus artist, Zishe Breitbart, put on a nighttime performance in the city of Lublin, Poland. That afternoon, while getting full on soup with kreplach (dumplings) and kishka (stuffed derma) at one of the local eateries, a large crowd of Jews started gathering outside the restaurant, eager to see their greatly admired hero in person. A group of Poles who happened to be in the area approached the Jewish fans and began taunting them: “Could it be that you’re so merry because Mendel Beilis has come here?” When Breitbart saw what was going[…]

The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, wrote that “Jews have six senses. Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing and…memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his[…]

Rosh Hashanah is just around the corner and it’s time to send some virtual Shana Tova cards, the Jewish New Year greetings, to your loved ones, friends and family members, as it been done throughout history. We at ANU – Museum of the Jewish People have accumulated A dozen of historical greeting cards from different historical periods and all corners of the world for you to choose from. There is A SHARE button on each Shana Tova. Select the one you relate to the most and SHARE it with whoever you choose on social media. Click the one you choose. Choose[…]

The evening of January 23, 1963 marked the start of a public trial held by the Jewish Agency against the Algerian Jewish community. Over 100 men and women crowded into the auditorium of the Jerusalem Artists’ House, where the key charge leveled against Algerian Jewry was their alleged flawed Zionist sentiment. The person behind the trial and its architect was the then Chairman of the Jewish Agency and former Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett. He was maddened by the fact that out of 140,000 Algerian Jews, only 15,000 had emigrated to Israel, while the others preferred to emigrate to France. “That[…]

“One of the greatest disadvantages of the human soul, and at the same time one of its deepest subtleties, is its inability to be revealed unless through the body,” wrote the Argentinian author, Ernesto Sábato, in his celebrated novel, On Heroes and Tombs. Sábato, who lived and worked in South America in the second half of the 20th century, said more than once that Franz Kafka was his most admired author. It is not hard to understand why. If ever there was a master of analyzing the human soul by means of the body, it was no doubt the gifted[…]

Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, was first jolted by his Jewish origins when he was six years old. It was a Shabbat in the afternoon when his father, Jacob, went out for a walk on the streets of Vienna, wearing a new fur hat. A Christian boy suddenly approached him and yelled, “Jew, get off the sidewalk” – and knocked his hat into the mud. When Jacob returned home, he told his family about the incident. “And what did you do?’ young Sigmund asked him. “I got off the sidewalk and picked up my hat,” his father answered.[…]