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“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” declared Israel’s first prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on the stage at Beit Dizengoff, 71 years ago today. To avoid desecrating the imminent Shabbat, he scheduled the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel for Friday afternoon, several hours before the cancellation of the British Mandate at midnight. Whether consciously or not, that shaped future relations of religion and state in the nascent nation. In keeping with Ben-Gurion’s vision of a melting pot, religion melded with the state after receiving its red membership booklet in the Histadrut labor[…]

The year was 1923, and among the main attractions for European football fans were English football leagues’ summer tours of the Continent. The gaps between the nation that invented football and its Continental neighbors were vast. The latter had yet to take its first steps in the game. No other all-star league trumped England’s until 1929, and the English leagues’ balls repeatedly landed in their opponents’ nets before wondrous eyes. West Ham United, the runner up for the cup that year, traveled to Austria on one of those tours. Winning easily elsewhere, the Austrian league surprised spectators in a 1:1[…]

Much like other bygone vocations that did not survive the technological revolution, a photo studio is one of the institutions that have been vanishing from the public sphere. The dark room, film strips, the hard labor of photo development, the thrilling expectation to find out how the photos turned out – have been replaced by digital cameras installed in mobile phones, allowing every talent-lacking young brat to be cameraman, director, designer, developer, and distributor of photos. But this is the story of a whole different kind of photographer: Jozef Bacior, who owned a photo studio in Żarki, Poland. Bacior was[…]

Catherine the Great, the Tsarina of Russia, was known for her insatiable lust. Legend has it that in her twilight years she grew tired of her lovers and turned to four-legged animals to satisfy her sexual needs. Those legends also claim that she went to her maker in the midst of passionate relations with a horse. The legends were refuted, but no one denies that Catherine the Great urges were overwhelming. During her rule, she was obsessed not only with sex – but with conquering nations, pathological collection of art, and familial murder. Historians maintain that she was behind the[…]

In Jungian terms, Israel’s sweeping victory in 1967 symbolized an archetypal revolution of the common Jew. The archetypal passive, docile, and persecuted Diaspora “galut Jew” – whom Bialik slammed in his poem “City of Slaughter” in 1903 – morphed into that of the brave, heroic, flawless “Jewish soldier” who destroyed his mortal enemy in six days of pure courage. The liberation of the Kotel provided a cathedral. It was not just the concrete liberation of the Jewish People’s holiest site – it was the spiritual and absolutely final liberation of the “galut Jew’s” flaccidity. The revolution of awareness began with[…]

Gefilte fish is probably Eastern-European Jewry’s most famous dish. Other well-known Jewish delicacies include borsht, bagels and shmalz. Today, however, not many are aware that the names of these familiar foods are also Jewish surnames, as are babke, kishke, tzimes and more. There are at least a hundred Israelis with the family name Herring, and over one hundred people in the U.S. bearing the last name Schmalz. Some family names originated from Yiddish terms such as Gitflaish (“good meat”), Vaisbroyt (“white bread”) and Feferkichen (a spice cake, sometimes translated as “gingerbread”). Others, such as Weisskraut (“white cabbage”) or Sauerapfel (“sour[…]