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In the early 1930’s, an unknown young Jewish lyricist called Aharon Ze’ev published the poem “We are carrying torches” – Anu Nos’im Lapidim, which became popular overnight among Zionist sing along lovers. It was a one-liner essence of all Zionist core ideas: No miracle happened for us / No cruise of oil did we find / We walked through the valley, ascended the mountain / We discovered wellsprings of hidden light / We quarried in the stone until we bled / “Let there be light!” These loved lyrics condensed the entire story of the Zionist movement, whose central goal was to[…]

Though he wasn’t the first to publish a modern newspaper in Hebrew; though the paper wasn’t the largest, nor the most popular; though he sometimes copied from his adversaries; and though he didn’t stand out in his education among his colleagues – still, the paper “HaMelitz” and its publisher and editor, Aleksander Zederbaum (“The Cedar”) have a special place in the hall of fame called 19th century Jewish journalism. One of the reasons for HaMelitz’s designation was the city in which it was published – St. Petersburg in Czarist Russia. When Zederbaum and his partner Aharon Isaac Goldblum launched their new[…]

November 25, 1940, 9 am. The illegal immigration ship “Patria” is docking in Haifa port. Suddenly, a loud blast rips the side of the ship. Huge amounts of water flood the ship and within minutes the old ocean liner, carrying 2,000 passengers, starts to sink. Chaos and panic all around, old people slip and fall to their death, large waves drown families trapped in low cabins, and dead bodies start to pile up on the shore. One of the passengers who refused to give up was Yosef Dekel. After all he and his wife went through escaping the Nazi horrors,[…]

Radical works of art may raise arguments and debates about whether they belong in the public arena and might even destroy the career of an appreciated author, who only wished to push some boundaries. That was the case of the Yiddish author Shalom Asch. Ash was born in 1880 in Kutno near Lodz, Poland, to a traditional family. From a young age he has familiarized himself to western literature, he was an autodidact and knew Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian from home, and also German, which he learned by himself. In his youth he tried to write in Hebrew, then soon[…]

Every year, on the fourth Thursday of November, Americans celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday, one that not only ushers in the winter holiday season, but also tells a story about the country’s founding and its values. Thanksgiving as a holiday whose purpose is to set aside a time for gratitude during, or in the wake of, difficult national moments, is explicitly connected to the most major moments in American history: the arrival of the pilgrims, the Revolutionary War that founded the country, and the Civil War that ultimately kept it together. For American Jews,[…]

You can tell a lot about religions by their archetypal protagonist. Generally speaking, Christianity is fond of pure, untarnished guys, those who turn their other cheek. The Muslims adore men who sacrifice their lives to reach paradise, whereas the Buddhists respect he who can live an entire life doing one thing – avoiding. Avoiding over eating, uninhibited sex, alcohol and drugs, and life in general. And Judaism? Well, it certainly resents the character of the agonized martyr. Jewish protagonists are deliberately portrayed full of flaws, bursting with drives and passions, just the opposite of saints. Abraham is manipulative, Isaac is[…]

This week a hundred years back, the first World War ended, in which 18 million people died, out of which 8 million were civilians. Not only was is a devastating war on its own, it also left us with some of the horrible illnesses of the 20th century: Nazism, Fascism, Bolshevism, to name a few. Even some of the Middle East conflicts, and the everlasting instability of states such as Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, are rooted in that war and its ending terms. World War I was one of the first wars in which Jews participated in masses as soldiers[…]

If we had to choose a date for “The Memorial Holocaust Denial Day”, it must be November 11. On this day in 2005 the historian David Irving, considered the greatest Holocaust deniers in the world, was arrested. This dubious title Irving owes to Deborah Lipstadt, a Jewish Professor from Emory University in Georgia. Lipstadt came from a family of Jewish immigrants from Germany. She was an anonymous lecturer in University, minding her work, when one day two world known Holocaust researchers addressed her and suggested she writes a research on Holocaust deniers. She laughed, “I might as well write on earth[…]