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He was sort of the Jewish version of Forrest Gump. He was considered one of the richest and most powerful people in the United States, a man shrouded with international mystery who overthrew governments, orchestrated coups and had government agreements amended to meet his business needs. The reason why you probably never heard his name is because he was obsessive about maintaining his anonymity. The intention is to Sam Zemurray – nicknamed “the banana man” – who built a business empire on his own from scratch and whose persona was a fascinating and unique amalgam of bigger than life figures,[…]

It is commonly believed that no organized Jewish fighting force was ever established after the Bar Kokhba Revolt, which broke out in the second century A.D., until the Jewish Legion was founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Joseph Trumpeldor during World War I. An examination of the historic turnabout that occurred in the Jewish mindset – between the time of the Kishinev pogrom and Nordau’s “muscular Judaism” and the formation of the Palmach followed by the IDF – can be found, among other things, in the wonderful book Land and Power, which was written by the historian, Prof. Anita Shapira. But[…]

In keeping with the proverb that great minds think alike, the inspiration for the name given to the popular two-piece bathing suit, the bikini, also came from the same source – the smallest particle of an element, the atom. As fate would have it, at the same time that a French automobile engineer named Louis Réard was working on the design of a revolutionary bathing suit after joining his mother’s clothing firm, nuclear testing was being done off the tiny island of Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. Réard believed, and was later found to be right, that the new[…]

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[…]