Jewish New Year Quotes

It's Harvest Time. Jewish New Year. Back to School. The new theatrical season. These are September to me. Apples and honey, sharpened pencils and the sounds of warm-ups, voices and bodies getting going. Hope and promise and things re-newed.

The Civil calendar is the only calendar used in Genesis and Exodus. When God told Moses to start numbering the days in the Spring, the sacred or religious calendar was created. From this point on, we must look at the passage to see which calendar is being used. All the dates given in this book are based on the civil calendar. The civil calendar is the standard one used by Jews today. This is why the Jewish new year takes place in the Fall.

I suppose, he was thinking, that we heard this tale of the Herzogs ten times a year. Sometimes Mama told it, sometimes he. So we had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie in the breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these are antiquities -- yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a Biblical sense of personal experience and destiny. What happened during the War abolished Father Herzog's claim to exceptional suffering. We are on a more brutal standard now, a new terminal standard, indifferent to persons. Part of the program of human destruction into which the human spirit has poured itself with energy, even with joy. These personal histories, old tales from old times that may not be worth remembering. I remember. I must. But who else -- to whom can this matter? So many millions -- multitudes -- go down in terrible pain. And, at that, moral suffering is denied, these days. Personalities are good only for comic relief. But I am still a slave to Papa's pain. The way Father Herzog spoke of himself! That could make one laugh. His I had such dignity.

Do you know why we will win this war?” Vosch asks us after we’re locked inside. “Why we cannot lose? Because we know how you think. We’ve been watching you for six thousand years. When the pyramids rose in the Egyptian desert, we were watching you. When Caesar burned the library at Alexandria, we were watching you. When you crucified that first-century Jewish peasant, we were watching. When Columbus set foot in the New World…when you fought a war to free millions of your fellow humans from bondage…when you learned how to split the atom…when you first ventured beyond your atmosphere…What

And in the complicated, relished, introspective web of young lovers, or more exactly, young petters, they progress along the oldest channel in the world and the most deceptive, for they are certain it is unique to them. Even as they are calling themselves engaged, they are losing the details of their subtle involved pledging of a troth. They are moved and warmed by intimacies between them, by long husky conversations in the parlor, in inexpensive restaurants, by the murmurs, the holding of hands in the dark velvet caverns of movie houses. They forget most of the things that have advanced them into love, feel now only the effect of them. And of course their conversation alters, new themes are bruited. Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life. After their engagement, Natalie talks over their prospects.

My people have more know-how in dealing with money than any other people on earth. It is not just a stereotype. I have traveled the world, and everywhere I go, Jews are always represented within the wealthiest sector of people in their countries. During the last 2,000 years, Jews have been expelled or turned away from almost every country in the world, but over and over again, they have been able to re-settle, start from nothing, and build significant wealth in new lands.

When you work hard, the temptation is to come home and just plotz (which is Jewish for “relax,” or maybe “die,” depending on the context)—to throw your dirty clothes on the floor or hide a mess behind closet doors. This is not a new story.

At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.' In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.

For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

Indeed, between 1909 and 1914 some forty thousand Jewish immigrants had arrived (although some left soon afterwards) and eighteen new colonies (of a 1914 total of fifty-two) had been created by the Zionist movement on land it had bought mainly from absentee landlords.

Once I've coated the parsnips in a honey-saffron glaze, Rachel helps me plate them alongside the brisket, stuffed cabbage, and sweet potato tzimmes, and we carry the plates out to the dining room together. "Let me explain a little about tonight's dinner," I say, addressing the softly lit faces around the table, which is covered with flickering votives and tapered candles. I launch into a description of the Jewish New Year and the symbolism behind all of the food: how the honey represents the hope of a sweet new year, how the challah is round instead of braided to represent the circle of life, how my grandmother used to make stuffed cabbage on every possible occasion because it reminded her of her Hungarian mother. I tell them lots things- about food, about my bubbe, about me- and to my surprise, they actually pay attention. They hang on my every word and ask intelligent questions and make thought-provoking points of their own. And I realize, hey, these are people who get it, people who love to eat and talk about food and culture as much as I do. Most of them aren't Jewish, but that doesn't matter. Every family has its traditions. Every family has a story to share. That's the point of this dinner- to swap stories and histories and see how food can bring people together.

Let me at this juncture deal also with the ridiculous accusation that I have heard for so many years to the effect that we ignored the Arabs of Palestine and set about developing the country as though it had no Arab population at all. When the instigators of the Arab disturbances of the late 1930s claimed, as they did, that the Arabs were attacking us because they had been ‘dispossessed’, I did not have to look up British census figures to know that the Arab population of Palestine had doubled since the start of the Jewish settlement there. I had seen for myself the rate of growth of the Arab population ever since I had first come to Palestine. Not only did the living standard of the Arabs of Palestine far exceed that of Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, but, attracted by the new opportunities, hordes of Arabs were immigrating to Palestine from Syria and other neighboring countries all through those years. Whenever some kindly representative of the British government sought to shut off Jewish immigration by declaring that there was not enough room in Palestine, I remember making speeches about Palestine’s larger absorptive capacity, complete with statistical references which I dutifully took from British sources, but which were based on what I had actually witnessed with my own eyes. And let me add, there was no time during the thirties that I did not hope that eventually the Arabs of Palestine would live with us in peace and equally as citizens of a Jewish homeland – just as I kept on hoping that Jews who live in Arab countries would be allowed to live there in peace and equality.

Christian reformism arose originally from the ability of its advocates to contrast the Old Testament with the New. The cobbled-together ancient Jewish books had an ill-tempered and implacable and bloody and provincial god, who was probably more frightening when he was in a good mood (the classic attribute of the dictator). Whereas the cobbled-together books of the last two thousand years contained handholds for the hopeful, and references to meekness, forgiveness, lambs and sheep, and so forth. This distinction is more apparent than real, since it is only in the reported observations of Jesus that we find any mention of hell and eternal punishment. The god of Moses would brusquely call for other tribes, including his favorite one, to suffer massacre and plague and even extirpation, but when the grave closed over his victims he was essentially finished with them unless he remembered to curse their succeeding progeny. Not until the advent of the Prince of Peace do we hear of the ghastly idea of further punishing and torturing the dead. First presaged by the rantings of John the Baptist, the son of god is revealed as one who, if his milder words are not accepted straightaway, will condemn the inattentive to everlasting fire. This has provided texts for clerical sadists ever since, and features very lip-smackingly in the tirades of Islam.

The key event in this realignment was the proclamation in 1942 at a major Zionist conference held at the Biltmore Hotel in New York of what was called the Biltmore Program.9 For the first time, the Zionist movement openly called for turning all of Palestine into a Jewish state: the exact demand was that “Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth.

The thing that weighed on him most, however, was the irrationality of the world in which he now found himself. To some extent he was a prisoner of his own training. As a historian, he had come to view the world as the product of historical forces and the decisions of more or less rational people, and he expected the men around him to behave in a civil and coherent manner. But Hitler’s government was neither civil nor coherent, and the nation lurched from one inexplicable moment to another. Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term “fanatical” became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Dresden, described as a “happy mix of courage and fervent devotion.” Nazi-controlled newspapers reported an endless succession of “fanatical vows” and “fanatical declarations” and “fanatical beliefs,” all good things. Göring was described as a “fanatical animal lover.” Fanatischer Tierfreund. Certain very old words were coming into darkly robust modern use, Klemperer found. Übermensch: superman. Untermensch: sub-human, meaning “Jew.” Wholly new words were emerging as well, among them Strafexpedition—“punitive expedition”—the term Storm Troopers applied to their forays into Jewish and communist neighborhoods. Klemperer detected a certain “hysteria of language” in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation—“This perpetual threatening with the death penalty!”—and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess, like the recent nationwide search. In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, “copied from American cinema and thrillers,” that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. In late July 1933 Klemperer saw a newsreel in which Hitler, with fists clenched and face contorted, shrieked, “On 30 January they”—and here Klemperer presumed he meant the Jews—“laughed at me—that smile will be wiped off their faces!” Klemperer was struck by the fact that although Hitler was trying to convey omnipotence, he appeared to be in a wild, uncontrolled rage, which paradoxically had the effect of undermining his boasts that the new Reich would last a thousand years and that all his enemies would be annihilated. Klemperer wondered, Do you talk with such blind rage “if you are so sure of this endurance and this annihilation”?

A study by the non-partisan wealth research firm New World Wealth found that 56.2 percent of the 13.1 million millionaires in the world were Christian, while 6.5 percent were Muslim, 3.9 percent were Hindu, and 1.7 percent were Jewish. In the U.S., 48 percent of Hindus have a yearly household income of $100,000 or more, and 70 percent have at least $75,000, which makes them the highest-earning ethnic group. But

In the United States, thirteen-year-old Jewish boys often mark the transition to adulthood with a bar mitzvah, involving a rather elaborate ceremony that includes singing a passage from the ancient Torah, followed by a celebration of dancing to hip-hop music and gorging on dessert. Sambian boys in Papua New Guinea mark the same transition by participating in the Flute Ceremony, which includes playing ritual flutes and performing fellatio on older boys and elders of their tribe. Imagine if the Sambian and American Jewish boy suddenly changed places. We’d witness how a momentous source of pride to members of one culture could be a totally meaningless or humiliating experience to members of another, because the behaviors and achievements that confer self-esteem do so only to the extent that we embrace a cultural worldview that deems them worthy.

All of the principal authors of the New Testament writings — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, and the unnamed author of Hebrews — attest to the divine claims, nature, and prerogatives of Jesus. These men wrote from thirty to sixty years after Jesus’ death; all of them except Luke were Jewish men who spent part of their lives in Judea and Galilee. They all either knew Jesus personally or knew people who had known Jesus personally.

The New Englander is half-mad. His idea of a good time is to preach sermons 51 weeks of the year, and destroy buildings on the 52nd. Besides, he lacks the refinement that can only come from wielding absolute power over a servile class.' 'The Southerner's religion is corrupt; his morals are lax; his plantations are cruel; his women are easy. His life is (shudder) deeply tempting.' 'Non-Pennsylvanians are all obsessed.' 'Hey, I'm Jewish. Where can I go but Rhode Island?' Any chance of uniting all of these? Not in 1765!

This is a love story. In 1916, during the First World War, two young Americans met by chance on a mysterious and now-forgotten estate near Chicago. At first they seemed to have little in common. She was Elizebeth Smith, a Quaker schoolteacher who found joy in poetry. He was William Friedman, a Jewish plant biologist from a poor family. But they fell for each other . Within a year they were married. They went on to change history together, in ways that still mark our lives today. They taught themselves to be spies— of a new and vital kind.

Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arab inhabitants, using force if necessary. Thus they believe that they are paving a way for the advent of the Messiah, which is at hand. In all its forms, fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith. Thus Rabbi Meir Kahane, the most extreme member of Israel’s Far Right until his assassination in New York in 1990: There

The ring of the old telephones, the clacking of typewriters, milk in bottles, baseball without designated hitters, vinyl records, galoshes, stockings and garter belts, black-and-white movies, heavyweight champions, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, paperback books for thirty-five cents, the political left, Jewish dairy restaurants, double features, basketball before the three-point shot, palatial movie houses, nondigital cameras, toaster that lasted for thirty years, contempt for authority, Nash Ramblers, and wood-paneled station wagons. But there is nothing you miss more than the world as it was before smoking was banned in public places.

In exchange for some wide-ranging modifications demanded by the socialist government to the church’s 1929 concordat, Italy agreed to underwrite the remainder of the $406 million settlement.53 The changes to the concordat would have once been unthinkable. The church dropped its insistence that Roman Catholicism be the state religion. Moving forward, the state had to confirm church-annulled marriages. Parents were given the right to opt their children out of formerly mandatory religious education classes. And Rome was no longer considered a “sacred city,” a classification that had allowed the Vatican to keep out strip clubs and the porn industry. Italy even managed to get the church to relinquish control of the Jewish catacombs. “The new concordat is another example of the diminishing hold of the Roman Catholic church in civil life in Italy,” noted The New York Times.54 In return, Italy instituted an“eight-per-thousand” tax, in which 0.8 percent of the income tax paid by ordinary Italians was distributed to one of twelve religious organizations recognized by the state. During its early years, nearly 90 percent of the tax went to the Catholic Church (by 2010, the church received less than 50 percent as the tax was more equitably distributed). Not only did the tax relieve Italy of its responsibility for the $135 million annual subsidy it paid for the country’s 35,000 priests, it meant the church had a steady and reliable source of much needed income.55

Reflecting the new balance of power between Britain and the United States, the committee ignored the case made by the Arabs and the preference of the British government, which was to continue to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine to avoid antagonizing the country’s Arab majority and the populations of the newly independent Arab states. The committee came to conclusions that mirrored precisely the desires of the Zionists and the Truman administration, including the recommendation to admit a hundred thousand Jewish refugees to Palestine. This signified that the 1939 White Paper was indeed a dead letter, that Britain no longer had the decisive voice in Palestine, and that it was the United States that would become the predominant external actor there and eventually in the rest of the Middle East.

By 1948, Israel no longer had to consider what “the Arabs” might want. Over seven hundred thousand Palestinians were uprooted from their own lands and banished by the advancing Israeli Army. Many of these people believed that they would be able to return to their homes after the war. But such a return would destroy the Israeli state project by turning Jews into a minority—the very thing Zionists sought to prevent. So the Palestinians were denied the “right of return,” and their land was confiscated by the state and handed over to other Israelis. The transformation was stunning: Before the establishment of the Israeli state, Palestinians owned 90 percent of all land in Mandatory Palestine. Most of this land was seized and incorporated into Israel. “From 1948 to 1953, the five years following the establishment of the state, 350 (out of a total of 370) new Jewish settlements were built on land owned by Palestinians,” writes Noura Erakat in her book Justice for Some. The threat of losing demographic supremacy still hangs over Israel. In 2003, future prime minister Ehud Olmert called on Israel to “maximize the number of Jews” and “minimize the number of Palestinians.” A “Muslim majority” would mean the “destruction of Israel as a Jewish state,” claimed former prime minister Ehud Barak. Netanyahu once warned that if Palestinian citizens ever reached 35 percent of Israel, the Jewish state would be “annulled.” Looking at the “absurd” borders of Jerusalem, the former deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti summarized the policy behind them as “the aspiration to include a maximum of land with a minimum of Arabs.

Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirts had surged to power. Now they held Germany by the throat. The Gestapo was rapidly creating a cruel and brutal police state that treated all but true Aryans like dogs and swine. That was certainly true for Jews like the Weisz family. In just the last few years, they and all of the Jewish families in Germany had been stripped of their citizenship and denied many of their most basic rights. Jacob’s father, an esteemed professor of German history, had been summarily fired from his prestigious post at Frederick William University in Berlin. The Weisz family had been forced out of their beautiful, spacious home in the suburbs of the capital. They’d had a big red J stamped on their official papers and had been denied permission to leave the country. So they had left Berlin and made a new home in Siegen.

Drying herself with the hem of her shift, she notes that her two candles are dimming; one of them is already a guttering stub. Will she light new ones? Well, that depends on what time of night it is, and Caroline has no clock. Few people in Church Lane do. Few know what year it is, or even that eighteen and a half centuries are supposed to have passed since a Jewish troublemaker was hauled away to the gallows for disturbing the peace. This is a street where people go to sleep not at a specific hour but when the gin takes effect, or when exhaustion will permit no further violence. This is a street where people wake when the opium in their babies’ sugar-water ceases to keep the little wretches under. This is a street where the weaker souls crawl into bed as soon as the sun sets and lie awake listening to the rats. This is a street reached only faintly, too faintly, by the bells of church and the trumpets of state.

There followed a three-year spectacle during which [Senator Joseph] McCarthy captured enormous media attention by prophesying the imminent ruin of America and by making false charges that he then denied raising—only to invent new ones. He claimed to have identified subversives in the State Department, the army, think tanks, universities, labor unions, the press, and Hollywood. He cast doubt on the patriotism of all who criticized him, including fellow senators. McCarthy was profoundly careless about his sources of information and far too glib when connecting dots that had no logical link. In his view, you were guilty if you were or ever had been a Communist, had attended a gathering where a supposed Communist sympathizer was present, had read a book authored by someone soft on Communism, or subscribed to a magazine with liberal ideas. McCarthy, who was nicknamed Tailgunner Joe, though he had never been a tail gunner, was also fond of superlatives. By the middle of 1951, he was warning the Senate of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.” McCarthy would neither have become a sensation, nor ruined the careers of so many innocent people, had he not received support from some of the nation’s leading newspapers and financing from right-wingers with deep pockets. He would have been exposed much sooner had his wild accusations not been met with silence by many mainstream political leaders from both parties who were uncomfortable with his bullying tactics but lacked the courage to call his bluff. By the time he self-destructed, a small number of people working in government had indeed been identified as security risks, but none because of the Wisconsin senator’s scattershot investigations. McCarthy fooled as many as he did because a lot of people shared his anxieties, liked his vituperative style, and enjoyed watching the powerful squirm. Whether his allegations were greeted with resignation or indignation didn’t matter so much as the fact that they were reported on and repeated. The more inflammatory the charge, the more coverage it received. Even skeptics subscribed to the idea that, though McCarthy might be exaggerating, there had to be some fire beneath the smoke he was spreading. This is the demagogue’s trick, the Fascist’s ploy, exemplified most outrageously by the spurious and anti-Jewish Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so. “Falsehood flies,” observed Jonathan Swift, “and the truth comes limping after it.” McCarthy’s career shows how much hysteria a skilled and shameless prevaricator can stir up, especially when he claims to be fighting in a just cause. After all, if Communism was the ultimate evil, a lot could be hazarded—including objectivity and conventional morality—in opposing it.

Throughout these long centuries, no people claim the land as their distinct homeland except the Jews. Alone they cherish Jerusalem as their eternal capital, proclaiming on each Jewish New Year “next year in Jerusalem.” Dispersed for centuries, suffering unparalleled persecution in their rootless sojourn among the nations, the Jews never lose hope of returning to the Promised Land. Individual Jews continue to return throughout the ages, joining the tiny Jewish communities that never left. But the land is barren, sparsely populated and undeveloped. Visiting the Holy Land in 1867, Mark Twain echoes many contemporary travelers when he says, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action… the desolate and unlovely land is hopeless, dreary and heartbroken.”17 A century later, Arab propaganda depicts things differently. It describes Palestine in the nineteenth century as a lush land teeming with a flourishing Arab population. “The Jewish invasion began in 1881,” says Arafat at an infamous United Nations speech in 1974. “Palestine was then a verdant area.”18 It wasn’t. Visiting the Holy Land in 1881, the famous British visitor Arthur Penrhyn Stanley reaffirms Twain’s observation fourteen years earlier: “In Judea, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that for miles and miles there was no appearance of life or habitation.”19 In the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish immigration brings the fallow land back to life. The Jews build farms, plant orange groves, erect factories. This induces immigration of Arabs from neighboring countries who join the indigenous Arab population. From 1860 on, the majority of Jerusalem’s inhabitants are Jewish. Even so, by the turn of the twentieth century the total population in the Holy Land doesn’t exceed four hundred thousand, less than 4 percent of the present population. As the visiting German Kaiser notes in 1898, “There is room here for everyone.”20

The Palestinian uprising, or intifada, which broke out in December 1987 was a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences.2 Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin had launched the invasion of Lebanon to quash the power of the PLO, and thereby end Palestinian nationalist opposition in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to the absorption of those territories into Israel. This would complete the colonial task of historic Zionism, creating a Jewish state in all of Palestine. The 1982 war did succeed in weakening the PLO, but the paradoxical effect was to strengthen the Palestinian national movement in Palestine itself, shifting the focus of action from outside to inside the country. After two decades of a relatively manageable occupation, Begin and Sharon, two fervent partisans of the Greater Israel ideal, had inadvertently sparked a new level of resistance to the process of colonization. Opposition to Israel’s landgrab and military rule has erupted within Palestine repeatedly and in different forms ever since.

AGNES EGGLING: mid- to late 30s; preferably heavyset. Bit player / character actress in the German film industry. GREGOR BAZWALD (BAZ): early to mid-30s. Homosexual who works for the Berlin Institute for Human Sexuality. PAULINKA ERDNUSS: mid-30s, but looks a little younger. Actress in the German film industry; a featured player on her way to becoming a minor star. ANNABELLA GOTCHLING: mid-40s. Communist artist and graphic designer. VEALTNINC HUSZ: mid-40s. Cinematographer. Hungarian exile. Missing an eye, he wears spectacles with one lens blackened. ROSA MALEK: mid- to late 20s. Minor functionary of the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands). EMIL TRAUM: mid- to late 20s. Slightly higher-ranking functionary of the KPD. DIE ALTE: a woman, very old but hard to tell how old—somewhere between 70 and dead-for-20-years. White face and rotten teeth. Dressed in a nightgown, once white but now soiled and food-stained. GOTTFRIED SWETTS: ageless; when he looks good he could be 30, when he looks bad he could be 50 (or more). Distinguished, handsome, blond, Aryan. ZILLAH KATZ: contemporary American Jewish woman. 30s. BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies.

Soldiers of the Eastern Front! In countless battles in the year 1941, you not only removed from the Finnish, German, Slovak, Hungarian, and Romanian borders the enemy who was ready to launch an attack, but you also drove him back over a thousand kilometers into his own land. In attempting to bring about a turn of events in the winter of 1941–1942 and to move against us once more, he must and will fail! Yes, on the contrary, in the year 1942, after all the preparations that have been made, we will engage this enemy of mankind anew and do battle with him for as long as it takes to break the destructive will of the Jewish-capitalist and Bolshevik world. Germany will not and cannot be dragged into a new war for its existence or nonexistence by the same criminals every twenty-five years! Europe cannot and will not tear itself to pieces forever, just so that a bunch of Anglo American and Jewish conspirators can find satisfaction for their business machinations in the dissatisfaction of the people. It is our hope that the blood that is spilled in this war will be the last in Europe for generations. May the Lord help us with this in the coming year! Address to the Wehrmacht: January 1, 1942

Dawn is purely a work of fiction, but I wrote it to look at myself in a new way. Obviously I did not live this tale, but I was implicated in its ethical dilemma from the moment that I assumed my character’s place. Difficult? Not really. Suppose the American army, instead of sending me to France, had handed me a visa to the Holy Land—would I have had the courage to join one of the movements that fought for the right of the Jewish people to form an independent state in their ancestral homeland? And if so, could I have gone all the way in my commitment and killed a man, a stranger? Would I have had the strength to claim him as my victim? So I wrote this novel in order to explore distant memories and buried doubts: What would have become of me if I had spent not just one year in the camps, but two or four? If I had been appointed kapo? Could I have struck a friend? Humiliated an old man? And taking the questions further within the context of the narrative: How are we ever to disarm evil and abolish death as a means to an end? How are we ever to break the cycle of violence and rage? Can terror coexist with justice? Does murder call for murder, despair for revenge? Can hate engender anything but hate? The

Close to forty thousand Germans gathered in front of Berlin’s opera house on May 10, 1933, as a parade of swastika-wearing students and beer-hall thugs carrying torches tossed books into a huge bonfire. Ordinary citizens poured forth carrying volumes looted from libraries and private homes. “Jewish intellectualism is dead,” propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his face fiery, yelled from the podium. “The German soul can again express itself.” What happened in Germany in 1933 was not just a brutality perpetrated by thuggish leaders and abetted by ignorant mobs. It was also, as Einstein described, “the utter failure of the so-called intellectual aristocracy.” Einstein and other Jews were ousted from what had been among the world’s greatest citadels of open-minded inquiry, and those who remained did little to resist. It represented the triumph of the ilk of Philipp Lenard, Einstein’s longtime anti-Semitic baiter, who was named by Hitler to be the new chief of Aryan science. “We must recognize that it is unworthy of a German to be the intellectual follower of a Jew,” Lenard exulted that May. “Heil Hitler!” It would be a dozen years before Allied troops would fight their way in and oust him from that role.41 Le

FOLKSBIENE, an impoverished, frail Yiddish theater company in constant danger of annihilation, had outlasted all the giants. The year of Schwartz's death the little troupe moved into the Forward building, guaranteeing it a permanent home with four walls and a roof, plus heat in the winter, fans in the summer, and best of all, continuing subsidies from the newspaper and the Workmen's Circle. Sporadically, other Yiddish productions would take place in New York, but they were one-shots, musicals, and charity fund-raisers. Ensconced in their new place, Folksbiene managers claimed that theirs was the oldest continuously operating Yiddish theater in the world. As proof, all past productions were listed year by year, ranging all the way back to 1915. It was an impressive roster. Among the authors included were Sholem Aleichem, Leon Kobrin, and both Singer brothers, Israel Joshua and Isaac Bashevis; also the Russians Alexander Pushkin and Maxim Gorki; and such American authors as Theodore Dreiser, Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, and Clifford Odets. It didn't matter how well attended those shows were, or how well acted, or the duration of their runs. The point was that the Folksbiene had survived, just as the Jewish people had survived. Together, they were the keepers of the flame. It was a very small candle in a very big city.

The appropriation of terms from psychology to discredit political opponents is part of the modern therapeutic culture that the sociologist Christopher Lasch criticized. Along with the concept of the authoritarian personality, the term “-phobe” for political opponents has been added to the arsenal of obloquy deployed by technocratic neoliberals against those who disagree with them. The coinage of the term “homophobia” by the psychologist George Weinberg in the 1970s has been followed by a proliferation of pseudoclinical terms in which those who hold viewpoints at variance with the left-libertarian social consensus of the transatlantic ruling class are understood to suffer from “phobias” of various kinds similar to the psychological disorders of agoraphobia (fear of open spaces), ornithophobia (fear of birds), and pentheraphobia (fear of one’s mother-in-law). The most famous use of this rhetorical strategy can be found in then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s leaked confidential remarks to an audience of donors at a fund-raiser in New York in 2016: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.” A disturbed young man who is driven by internal compulsions to harass and assault gay men is obviously different from a learned Orthodox Jewish rabbi who is kind to lesbians and gay men as individuals but opposes homosexuality, along with adultery, premarital sex, and masturbation, on theological grounds—but both are "homophobes.” A racist who opposes large-scale immigration because of its threat to the supposed ethnic purity of the national majority is obviously different from a non-racist trade unionist who thinks that immigrant numbers should be reduced to create tighter labor markets to the benefit of workers—but both are “xenophobes.” A Christian fundamentalist who believes that Muslims are infidels who will go to hell is obviously different from an atheist who believes that all religion is false—but both are “Islamophobes.” This blurring of important distinctions is not an accident. The purpose of describing political adversaries as “-phobes” is to medicalize politics and treat differing viewpoints as evidence of mental and emotional disorders. In the latter years of the Soviet Union, political dissidents were often diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia” and then confined to psychiatric hospitals and drugged. According to the regime, anyone who criticized communism literally had to be insane. If those in today’s West who oppose the dominant consensus of technocratic neoliberalism are in fact emotionally and mentally disturbed, to the point that their maladjustment makes it unsafe to allow them to vote, then to be consistent, neoliberals should support the involuntary confinement, hospitalization, and medication of Trump voters and Brexit voters and other populist voters for their own good, as well as the good of society.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

Each generation identifies with a small group of people said to have lived lives exemplifying the vices and virtues of that generation. If one were to choose a trial lawyer whose life reflected the unique characteristics of America’s “Wild West” of a criminal justice system in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, that person likely would be my father. New York City of the 1960s until the turn of the 21st century was the world’s epicenter of organized and white-collar crime. During those four decades, the most feared mafia chiefs, assassins, counterfeiters, Orthodox Jewish money launderers, defrocked politicians of every stripe, and Arab bankers arriving in the dead of night in their private jets, sought the counsel of one man: my father, Jimmy La Rossa. Once a Kennedy-era prosecutor, Brooklyn-born Jimmy La Rossa became one of the greatest criminal trial lawyers of his day. He was the one man who knew where all of the bodies were buried, and everyone knew it. It seemed incomprehensible that Jimmy would one day just disappear from New York. Forever. After stealing my dying father from New York Presbyterian Hospital to a waiting Medevac jet, the La Rossa Boys, as we became known, spent the next five years in a place where few would look for two diehard New Yorkers: a coastal town in the South Bay of Los Angeles, aptly named Manhattan Beach. While I cooked him his favorite Italian dishes and kept him alive using the most advanced medical equipment and drugs, my father and I documented our notorious and cinematic life together as equal parts biography and memoir. This is our story.

As Allied forces moved into Hitler’s Fortress Europe, Roosevelt and his circle were confronted with new evidence of the Holocaust. In early 1942, he had been given information that Adolf Hitler was quietly fulfilling his threat to “annihilate the Jewish race.” Rabbi Stephen Wise asked the President that December 1942 to inform the world about “the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history” and “try to stop it.” Although he was willing to warn the world about the impending catastrophe and insisted that there be war crimes commissions when the conflict was over, Roosevelt told Wise that punishment for such crimes would probably have to await the end of the fighting, so his own solution was to “win the war.” The problem with this approach was that by the time of an Allied victory, much of world Jewry might have been annihilated. By June 1944, the Germans had removed more than half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews, and some Jewish leaders were asking the Allies to bomb railways from Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In response, Churchill told his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, that the murder of the Jews was “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world,” and ordered him to get “everything” he could out of the British Air Force. But the Prime Minister was told that American bombers were better positioned to do the job. At the Pentagon, Stimson consulted John McCloy, who later insisted, for decades, that he had “never talked” with Roosevelt about the option of bombing the railroad lines or death camps. But in 1986, McCloy changed his story during a taped conversation with Henry Morgenthau’s son, Henry III, who was researching a family history. The ninety-one-year-old McCloy insisted that he had indeed raised the idea with the President, and that Roosevelt became “irate” and “made it very clear” that bombing Auschwitz “wouldn’t have done any good.” By McCloy’s new account, Roosevelt “took it out of my hands” and warned that “if it’s successful, it’ll be more provocative” and “we’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” as well as “bombing innocent people.” McCloy went on, “I didn’t want to bomb Auschwitz,” adding that “it seemed to be a bunch of fanatic Jews who seemed to think that if you didn’t bomb, it was an indication of lack of venom against Hitler.” If McCloy’s memory was reliable, then, just as with the Japanese internment, Roosevelt had used the discreet younger man to discuss a decision for which he knew he might be criticized by history, and which might conceivably have become an issue in the 1944 campaign. This approach to the possible bombing of the camps would allow the President to explain, if it became necessary, that the issue had been resolved at a lower level by the military. In retrospect, the President should have considered the bombing proposal more seriously. Approving it might have required him to slightly revise his insistence that the Allies’ sole aim should be winning the war, as he did on at least a few other occasions. But such a decision might have saved lives and shown future generations that, like Churchill, he understood the importance of the Holocaust as a crime unparalleled in world history.*

Trump’s unpredictability caused much discomfort among his frequently changing staff and among America’s allies, who were used to automatic, reflexive support from American presidents. But it had its uses internationally by putting America’s adversaries off balance and instilling fear in its enemies. As Israel’s prime minister, I saw it as my job to carefully navigate through the new reality Trump brought to Washington in order to advance Israel’s security and vital national interests and to forge four historic peace agreements. I could do so because Trump adopted an entirely new approach to peacemaking. He did not heed bureaucratic orthodoxy and was willing to go outside the box. For the first time in Israel’s history, peace was achieved without ceding territory or uprooting Jews from their homes. It was based on mutual economic, diplomatic and security interests in which all sides benefited. In addition to recognizing Jerusalem and the Golan, President Trump recognized the legality of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. In confronting Iran he was equally bold. Recognizing the absurdity of the Iran deal, he withdrew from it and did not hesitate to apply forceful economic and military pressures on Tehran. In all this he was a true trailblazer. Despite bumps in the road, our years together were the best ever for the Israeli-American alliance, strengthening security and bringing four historic peace accords to Israel and the Middle East. They showed the world that great things happen when an American president and an Israeli prime minister work in tandem, with no daylight between them. We proved conclusively that if you pursue peace through strength, you get both.

In the Old Testament, the Egyptian ruler during the period of Prophet Ibrahim (as) and Prophet Yusuf (as) are named "Pharaoh." However, this title was actually employed after the eras in which these two prophets lived. While addressing the Egyptian ruler at the time of Prophet Yusuf (as), the word "Al-Malik" in Arabic is used in the Qur'an: It refers to a ruler, king or sultan: The King said, ‘Bring him to me straight away!'… (Qur'an, 12:50) The ruler of Egypt in the time of Prophet Musa (as) is referred to as "Pharaoh." This distinction in the Qur'an is not made in the Old and New Testaments nor by Jewish historians. In the Bible, the word "Pharaoh" is used, in every reference to an Egyptian monarch. On the other hand, the Qur'an is far more concise and accurate in the terminology it employs. The use of the word "Pharaoh" in Egyptian history belongs only to the late period. This particular title began to be employed in the 14th century B.C., during the reign of Amenhotep IV. Prophet Yusuf (as) lived at least 200 years before that time. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that the word "Pharaoh" was a title of respect used from the New Kingdom (beginning with the 18th dynasty; B.C. 1539-1292) until the 22nd dynasty (B.C. 945-730), after which this term of address became the title of the king. Further information on this Allah's Miracles in the Qur'an 291 subject comes from the Academic American Encyclopaedia, which states that the title of Pharaoh began to be used in the New Kingdom. As we have seen, the use of the word "Pharaoh" dates from a specific period in history. For that reason, the fact that the Qur'an distinguishes between the different Egyptian titles in different Egyptian eras is yet another proof that the Qur'an is Allah's word.

But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

Of course, historical scholarship on the New Testament is open to all, whether Jewish or Christian, atheist or agnostic. But the present debate about Paul and justification is taking place between people most of whom declare their allegiance to Scripture in general, and perhaps to Paul in particular, as the place where and the means by which the living God has spoken, and still speaks, with life-changing authority. This ought to mean, but does not always mean, that exegesis-close attention to the actual flow of the text, to the questions that it raises in itself and the answers it gives in and of itself-should remain the beginning and the end of the process. Systematize all you want in between-we all do it; there is nothing wrong with it and much to be said for it, particularly when it involves careful comparing of different treatments of similar topics in different contexts. But start with exegesis, and remind yourself that the end in view is not a tidy system, sitting in hard covers on a shelf where one may look up "correct answers," but the sermon, or the shared pastoral reading, or the scriptural word to a Synod or other formal church gathering, or indeed the life of witness to the love of God, through all of which the church is built up and energized for mission, the Christian is challenged, transformed and nurtured in the faith, and the unbeliever is confronted with the shocking but joyful news that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. That is letting Scripture be Scripture. Scripture, in other words, does not exist to give authoritative answers to questions other than those it addresses-not even to the questions which emerged from especially turbulent years such as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That is not to say that one cannot deduce from Scripture appropriate answers to such later questions, only that you have to be careful and recognize that that is indeed what you are doing.

We can start with approximately nine traditional authors of the New Testament. If we consider the critical thesis that other authors wrote the pastoral letters and such letters as Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians, we'd have an even larger number. Another twenty early Christian authors20 and four heretical writings mention Jesus within 150 years of his death on the cross.21 Moreover, nine secular, non-Christian sources mention Jesus within the 150 years: Josephus, the Jewish historian; Tacitus, the Roman historian; Pliny the Younger, a politician of Rome; Phlegon, a freed slave who wrote histories; Lucian, the Greek satirist; Celsus, a Roman philosopher; and probably the historians Suetonius and Thallus, as well as the prisoner Mara Bar-Serapion.22 In all, at least forty-two authors, nine of them secular, mention Jesus within 150 years of his death. In comparison, let's take a look at Julius Caesar, one of Rome's most prominent figures. Caesar is well known for his military conquests. After his Gallic Wars, he made the famous statement, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Only five sources report his military conquests: writings by Caesar himself, Cicero, Livy, the Salona Decree, and Appian.23 If Julius Caesar really made a profound impact on Roman society, why didn't more writers of antiquity mention his great military accomplishments? No one questions whether Julius did make a tremendous impact on the Roman Empire. It is evident that he did. Yet in those 150 years after his death, more non-Christian authors alone comment on Jesus than all of the sources who mentioned Julius Caesar's great military conquests within 150 years of his death. Let's look at an even better example, a contemporary of Jesus. Tiberius Caesar was the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus' ministry and execution. Tiberius is mentioned by ten sources within 150 years of his death: Tacitus, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Josephus, and Luke.24 Compare that to Jesus' forty-two total sources in the same length of time. That's more than four times the number of total sources who mention the Roman emperor during roughly the same period. If we only considered the number of secular non-Christian sources who mention Jesus and Tiberius within 150 years of their lives, we arrive at a tie of nine each.25

If one could nominate an absolutely tragic day in human history, it would be the occasion that is now commemorated by the vapid and annoying holiday known as “Hannukah.” For once, instead of Christianity plagiarizing from Judaism, the Jews borrow shamelessly from Christians in the pathetic hope of a celebration that coincides with “Christmas,” which is itself a quasi-Christian annexation, complete with burning logs and holly and mistletoe, of a pagan Northland solstice originally illuminated by the Aurora Borealis. Here is the terminus to which banal “multiculturalism” has brought us. But it was nothing remotely multicultural that induced Judah Maccabeus to reconsecrate the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC, and to establish the date which the soft celebrants of Hannukah now so emptily commemorate. The Maccabees, who founded the Hasmonean dynasty, were forcibly restoring Mosaic fundamentalism against the many Jews of Palestine and elsewhere who had become attracted by Hellenism. These true early multiculturalists had become bored by “the law,” offended by circumcision, interested by Greek literature, drawn by the physical and intellectual exercises of the gymnasium, and rather adept at philosophy. They could feel the pull exerted by Athens, even if only by way of Rome and by the memory of Alexander’s time, and were impatient with the stark fear and superstition mandated by the Pentateuch. They obviously seemed too cosmopolitan to the votaries of the old Temple—and it must have been easy to accuse them of “dual loyalty” when they agreed to have a temple of Zeus on the site where smoky and bloody altars used to propitiate the unsmiling deity of yore. At any rate, when the father of Judah Maccabeus saw a Jew about to make a Hellenic offering on the old altar, he lost no time in murdering him. Over the next few years of the Maccabean “revolt,” many more assimilated Jews were slain, or forcibly circumcised, or both, and the women who had flirted with the new Hellenic dispensation suffered even worse. Since the Romans eventually preferred the violent and dogmatic Maccabees to the less militarized and fanatical Jews who had shone in their togas in the Mediterranean light, the scene was set for the uneasy collusion between the old-garb ultra-Orthodox Sanhedrin and the imperial governorate. This lugubrious relationship was eventually to lead to Christianity (yet another Jewish heresy) and thus ineluctably to the birth of Islam. We could have been spared the whole thing.

As soon as the Rabbi of Bluzhov had finished the ceremony of kindling the lights, Zamietchkowski elbowed his way to the rabbi and said, “Spira, you are a clever and honest person. I can understand your need to light Hanukkah candles in these wretched times. I can even understand the historical note of the second blessing, ‘Who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season.’ But the fact that you recited the third blessing is beyond me. How could you thank God and say ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us alive, and hast preserved us, and enabled us to reach this season’? How could you say it when hundreds of dead Jewish bodies are literally lying within the shadows of the Hanukkah lights, when thousands of living Jewish skeletons are walking around in camp, and millions more are being massacred? For this you are thankful to God? For this you praise the Lord? This you call ‘keeping us alive’?” “Zamietchkowski, you are a hundred percent right,” answered the rabbi. “When I reached the third blessing, I also hesitated and asked myself, what should I do with this blessing? I turned my head in order to ask the Rabbi of Zaner and other distinguished rabbis who were standing near me, if indeed I might recite the blessing. But just as I was turning my head, I noticed that behind me a throng was standing, a large crowd of living Jews, their faces expressing faith, devotion, and concentration as they were listening to the rite of the kindling of the Hanukkah lights. I said to myself, if God, blessed be He, has such a nation that at times like these, when during the lighting of the Hanukkah lights they see in front of them the heaps of bodies of their beloved fathers, brothers, and sons, and death is looking from every corner, if despite all that, they stand in throngs and with devotion listening to the Hanukkah blessing ‘Who wroughtest miracles for our fathers in days of old, at this season’; if, indeed, I was blessed to see such a people with so much faith and fervor, then I am under a special obligation to recite the third blessing.”2 Some years after liberation, the Rabbi of Bluzhov, now residing in Brooklyn, New York, received regards from Mr. Zamietchkowski. Zamietchkowski asked the son of the Skabiner Rabbi to tell Israel Spira, the Rabbi of Bluzhov, that the answer he gave him that dark Hanukkah night in Bergen Belsen had stayed with him ever since, and was a constant source of inspiration during hard and troubled times. Based

The German Volk will believe me when I say that I would have chosen peace over war. Because for me, peace meant a multitude of delightful assignments. What I was able to do for the German Volk in the few years from 1933 to 1939, thanks to Providence and the support of numerous excellent assistants, in terms of culture, education, as well as economic recovery, and, above all, in the social organization of our lives, this can surely one day be compared with what my enemies have done and achieved in the same period. In the long years of struggle for power, I often regretted that the realization of my plans was spoiled by incidents that were not only relatively unimportant, but also, above all, completely insignificant. I regret this war not only because of the sacrifices that it demands of my German Volk and of other people, but also because of the time it takes away from those who intend to carry out a great social and civilizing work and who want to complete it. After all, what Mr. Roosevelt is capable of achieving, he has proved. What Mr. Churchill has achieved, nobody knows. I can only feel profound regret at what this war will prevent me and the entire National Socialist movement from doing for many years. It is a shame that a person cannot do anything about true bunglers and lazy fellows stealing the valuable time that he wanted to dedicate to cultural, social, and economic projects for his Volk. The same applies to Fascist Italy. There, too, one man has perpetuated his name for all time through a civilizing and national revolution of worldwide dimensions. In the same way it cannot be compared to the democratic-political bungling of the idlers and dividend profiteers, who, in the Anglo-American countries, for instance, spend the wealth accumulated by their fathers or acquire new wealth through shady deals. It is precisely because this young Europe is involved in the resolution of truly great questions that it will not allow the representatives of a group of powers who tactfully call themselves the “have” states to rob them of everything that makes life worth living, namely, the value of one’s own people, their freedom, and their social and general human existence. Therefore, we understand that Japan, weary of the everlasting blackmail and impudent threats, has chosen to defend itself against the most infamous warmongers of all time. Now a mighty front of nation-states, reaching from the Channel to East Asia, has taken up the struggle against the international Jewish-capitalist and Bolshevik conspiracy. New Year’s Proclamation to the National Socialists and Party Comrades January 1, 1942

This generation grew up constantly reminded that they lived in the greatest country in the world, the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all its citizens. Yet, as they matured, members of this generation found a disturbing disparity between this popular American self-image and actual reality. They found that many people in this land—women and certain racial minorities—were, by law and custom, definitely not free. By the sixties the new generation was inspecting closely, and many were finding other disturbing aspects of the United States’ self-image—for instance, a blind patriotism that expected young people to go into a foreign land to fight a political war that had no clearly expressed purpose and no prospect of victory. Just as disturbing was the culture’s spiritual practice. The materialism of the previous four hundred years had pushed the mystery of life, and death, far into the background. Many found the churches and synagogues full of pompous and meaningless ritual. Attendance seemed more social than spiritual, and the members too restricted by a sense of how they might be perceived and judged by their onlooking peers. As the vision progressed, I could tell that the new generation’s tendency to analyze and judge arose from a deep-seated intuition that there was more to life than the old material reality took into account. The new generation sensed new spiritual meaning just beyond the horizon, and they began to explore other, lesser known religions and spiritual points of view. For the first time the Eastern religions were understood in great numbers, serving to validate the mass intuition that spiritual perception was an inner experience, a shift in awareness that changed forever one’s sense of identity and purpose. Similarly the Jewish Cabalist writings and the Western Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckehart and Teilhard de Chardin, provided other intriguing descriptions of a deeper spirituality. At the same time, information was surfacing from the human sciences—sociology, psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology—as well as from modern physics, that cast new light on the nature of human consciousness and creativity. This cumulation of thought, together with the perspective provided by the East, gradually began to crystallize into what was later called the Human Potential Movement, the emerging belief that human beings were presently actualizing only a small portion of their vast physical, psychological, and spiritual potential I watched as, over the course of several decades, this information and the spiritual experience it spawned grew into a critical mass of awareness, a leap in consciousness from which we began to formulate a new view of what living a human life was all about,

I COULD HAVE reminded the Arab Knesset member of other historical facts once known to many schoolchildren but which have since been forgotten—or distorted by anti-Israel propaganda. The history of the Jewish people spans almost four millennia. The first thousand years or so are covered in the Bible, and are attested to by archaeology and the historical records of other, contemporaneous peoples. As the centuries progress, the mists of time and the myths gradually evaporate and the unfolding events come into sharp historical focus. Reading the Bible from second grade on, I could easily imagine Abraham and Sarah on their long trek from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan almost four thousand years ago. Abraham envisions one God, unseen but present everywhere. He buys a burial cave in Hebron and bequeaths the new land to his progeny. The descendants of Abraham’s grandson Jacob are enslaved in Egypt for centuries, until Moses takes them out of bondage. He leads them for forty years in the wilderness to the Promised Land, giving the Children of Israel the Ten Commandments and a moral code that would change the world. The indomitable Joshua conquers the land, wily David establishes his kingdom in Jerusalem, and wise Solomon builds his Temple there, only to have his sons split the realm into two. The northern kingdom, Israel, is destroyed, its ten tribes lost to history. The southern kingdom, Judea, is conquered and Solomon’s Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians, by whose rivers the exiled Judeans weep as they remember Zion. They rejoice when in 537 BCE they are reinstated in their homeland by Cyrus of Persia, who lets them rebuild their destroyed Temple. The Persian rulers are replaced by Alexander the Great, one of whose heirs seeks to eradicate the Jewish religion. This sparks a rebellion led by the brave Maccabees, and the independent Jewish state they establish lasts for eighty years. It is overtaken by the rising power Rome which initially rules through proxies, the most notable of whom is Herod the Great. Herod refurbishes the Jerusalem Temple as one of the great wonders of the ancient world. In its bustling courtyard a Jewish rabbi from the Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, overturns the tables of the money changers, setting off a chain of events culminating in his eventual crucifixion and the beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition. When the Jews rebel against Roman rule, Rome destroys Jerusalem and Herod’s Temple in 70 CE. Masada, the last rebel stronghold, falls three years later. Despite the devastation, sixty-two years later the Jews rebel again under the fearless Bar Kokhba, only to be crushed even more brutally. The Roman emperor Hadrian bars the Jews from Jerusalem and renames the country Palestina, after the Grecian Philistines, who have long disappeared.

Year after year, they are joined by a new age group from Germany’s youth, totally educated in accordance with National Socialist principles, forged together by the ideas of our Volksgemeinschaft, and willing to move against anyone who should dare to sin against our fight for freedom. And just as in the time of the party’s struggle for power, our female party comrades, our German women and girls, were the most reliable supports of the movement, so now again the multitude of our women and girls form the strongest element in the struggle for the preservation of our Volk. After all, thank God, not only the Jews in London and New York but also those in Moscow made clear what fate might be in store for the German Volk. We are determined to be no less clear in our answer. This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan but with the extermination of the Jew in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people, even of our enemies. State after state will be forced, in the course of its fight against us, to apply National Socialist theories in waging this war that was provoked by them. And in so doing, it will become aware of the curse that the criminal work of Jewry has laid over all people, especially through this war. As our enemies thought in 1923 that the National Socialist Party was defeated for good and that I was finished with in the eyes of the German Volk because of my trial, so they actually helped National Socialist ideology to spread like wildfire through the entire German Volk and convey the essence of Jewry to so many million men, as we ourselves would never have been able to do under normal circumstances. In the same manner international Jewry, which instigated this new war, will find out that nation after nation engrosses itself more and more in this question to become finally aware of the great danger presented by this international problem. Above all, this war proves the irrefutable identity of plutocracy and Bolshevism, and the common ambition of all Jews to exploit nations and make them the slaves of their international guild of criminals. The same alliance we once faced as our common enemies in Germany, an alliance between the stock exchange in Frankfurt and the “Red Flag” in Berlin, now again exists between the Jewish banking houses in New York, the Jewishplutocratic class of leaders in London, and the Jews in the Kremlin in Moscow. Just as the German Volk successfully fought the Jewish enemy at home as a consequence of this realization and is now about to finish it off for good, the other nations will increasingly find themselves again in the course of this war. Together, they will make a stand against that race that is seeking to destroy all of them. Proclamation for the 23th anniversary of the N.S.D.A.P. (read by Hermann Esser) Fuhrer Headquarters, February 24, 1943

Speech to the Reichstag April 26, 1942 The British Jew, Lord Disraeli, once said that the race problem is the key to the history of the world. We National Socialists have become great in this knowledge. By devoting our attention to the existence of the race problem, we have found the solution for many problems which would have otherwise have seemed incomprehensible. The hidden forces which incited England already in 1914, in the first world war, were Jews. The force which paralyzed us at that time and finally forced us to surrender with the slogan that Germany was no longer able to bear homeward a victorious flag, came from the Jews. It was the Jews who fomented the revolution among our people and thus robbed us of every possibility at further resistance. Since 1939 the Jews have maneuvered the British Empire into the most perilous crisis it has ever known. The Jews were the carriers of that Bolshevist infection which once threatened to destroy Europe. It was also they who incited the ranks of the plutocracies to war, and it is the Jews who have driven America to war against all her own interests, simply and solely from the Jewish capitalistic point of view. And President Roosevelt, lacking ability himself, lends an ear to his brain trust, whose leading men I do not need to mention by name; they are Jews, nothing but Jews. And once again, as in the year 1915, she (America) will be incited by a Jewish President and his completely Jewish entourage to go to war without any reason or sense whatever, with nations which have never done anything to America, and with people from whom America can never win anything. For what is the sense of a war waged by a state having territory without people against people without territory. In the terms of the war it is no longer a question of the interests of individual nations; it is, rather, a question of conflict between nations which want to make the lives of their people secure on this earth, and nations which have become the helpless tools of an international world parasite. The German soldiers and the allies have had an opportunity to witness at first hand the actual work of this Jewish International-war mongers in that country in which Jewish dictatorship has exclusive power and in which it is being taught as the most ideal form of government in the world for future generations and to which low subjects of other nations have become inexplicably subservient just as this was the case with us at one time. And at this juncture this seemingly senile Europe has, as always in the course of its history, raised aloft the torch of its perception and today the men of Europe are marching as the representatives of a new and better order as the genuine youth of social and national liberty throughout the world. Gentlemen! In the course of this winter a decision has been reached in international struggle which as regards to problems involved far exceeds in scope those difficulties which must and can be solved in normal warfare; when in November 1918 the German nation being befogged by the hypocritical phraseology of the American President at that time, Wilson, laid down its arms, although undefeated, and withdrew from the field of battle it was acting under the influence of that Jewish race which hoped to succeed in establishing a secure bulwark of Bolshevism in the very heart of Europe. We know the theoretical principles and the cruel truth regarding the aims of this world-wide pestilence. It is called, "the Rule of the Proletariat," and it really is "Jewish Dictatorship," the extermination of national government and of the intelligent element among the nations, and the rule over the proletariat after it has thus deprived of its leaders and through its own fault ended defenseless by the concerted efforts of Jewish international criminals.

Shortly after the meeting, the British made their policy official in the form of a White Paper that ended Jewish immigration, forbade Jewish land purchases, and declared an Arab majority state to be formed within ten years. The new policy meant an end to the Zionist hopes of a state of their own.

International Socialist Review Issue 24, July–August 2002 Stephen Jay Gould: Dialectical Biologist by Phil Gasper Every major newspaper carried an obituary of Gould after his death, praising his scientific accomplishments. But most said nothing about another important aspect of Gould’s life–his radical politics. Gould was a red diaper baby. His maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants who worked in Manhattan’s garment sweatshops in the early years of the last century, just blocks from the horrific Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 workers in 1911. "I grew up in a family of Jewish immigrant garment workers," Gould wrote, "and this holocaust (in the literal meaning of a thorough sacrifice by burning)…set their views and helped to define their futures."4 Gould’s parents were New York leftists, probably in or around the Communist Party in the 1930s, and he once boasted that he had learned his Marxism "literally at [my] daddy’s knee.

Every New Year's Day, my parents had a big party, and their friends came over and bet on the Rose Bowl and argued about which of the players on either team were Jewish, and my mother served her famous lox and onions and eggs, which took her the entire first half to make. It took her so long, in fact, that I really don't have time to give you the recipe, because it takes up a lot of space to explain how slowly and painstakingly she did everything, sautéing the onions over a tiny flame so none of them would burn, throwing more and more butter into the pan, cooking the eggs so slowly that my father was always sure they wouldn't be ready until the game was completely over and everyone had gone home. We should have known my mother was crazy years before we did just because of the maniacal passion she brought to her lox and onions and eggs, but we didn't. Another thing my mother was famous for serving was a big ham along with her casserole of lima beans and pears. A couple of years ago, I was in Los Angeles promoting Uncle Seymour's Beef Borscht and a woman said to me at a party, "Wasn't your mother Bebe Samstat?" and when I said yes, she said, "I have her recipe for lima beans and pears. " I like to think it would have amused my mother to know that there is someone in Hollywood who remembers her only for her lima beans and pears, but it probably wouldn't have. Anyway, here's how you make it: Take 6 cups defrosted lima beans, 6 pears peeled and cut into slices, 1/2 cup molasses, 1/2 cup chicken stock, 1/2 onion chopped, put into a heavy casserole, cover and bake 12 hours at 200*. That's the sort of food she loved to serve, something that looked like plain old baked beans and then turned out to have pears up its sleeve. She also made a bouillabaisse with Swiss chard in it. Later on, she got too serious about food- started making egg rolls from scratch, things like that- and one night she resigned from the kitchen permanently over a lobster Cantonese that didn't work out, and that was the beginning of the end.

Over the years the Sephardim in America had gradually modified their religious services to conform more closely to the prevailing Protestant ways. Early in the 1800’s Temple Shearith Israel had introduced English into the service. The cantors, or chazonim, began to assume the dignity, and the dress, of Protestant clergymen and were called “Reverend.” The public auctioning of honors, which began to seem undignified, was discontinued.

The war on Christianity was also made manifest in the efforts to introduce neopaganism into the lives of the people. Joseph Ratzinger recalled that a young teacher in the village erected a maypole as a symbol of the pagan concept of the “life force.” He organized festivals for the summer solstice in homage to the sacredness of nature and dismissed traditional notions of sin, virtue, and redemption as alien ideas imposed by the cultural imperialism of the Jewish and Roman religion of Christianity. The old religious ideas had to make way for the new order, and the new order demanded a new age. Sixty years later, in his memoirs, Cardinal Ratzinger compared the anti-Christian neopaganism of the Nazis with the anti-Christian neopaganism of our own day: “When nowadays I hear how in many parts of the world Christianity is criticized as a destruction of individual cultural identity and an imposition of European values, I am amazed at how similar the types of argumentation are and at how familiar many a turn of phrase sounds.

A central concern with the Levantine way of life revolved around traditional family structures, which supposedly obstructed the Oriental immigrants’ transformation into Israelis. Thus, Moshe Kol, the head of the Jewish Agency’s Youth Aliyah Department, argued in favor of bringing in North African youngsters without their families within the framework of Youth Aliyah: “By the time the families come to Israel after two or three years the absorption work will be a lot easier. If we don’t do this, all the families will come by themselves and the state will turn into an exile (galut). . . . If we first bring the young, we can take care of them. . . . If not, we are likely to drown in a sea of Levantinism (levantiniyut) and Israel will turn into a country of the Levant.”110 In Kol’s view, the uncontrolled immigration of entire Oriental Jewish families thus threatened to destroy the dividing line between the old way of life in the Galut and the new Jewish way of being that was supposed to be Israel.

To explain how we got to this seemingly intractable place, a little history is required—never a simple proposition in a part of the world where rivaling versions of the past are a dense thicket. The 1930s saw a series of Arab revolts against the influx of Jewish migrants to Palestine, which was then under British control. This wave of Jewish immigration was regarded by many Palestinians as a colonial imposition, a perception that was further cemented when British troops and local police put down the Arab uprising with tremendous force, fueling further resentment. When Palestine was partitioned in 1947, a move with overwhelming Arab opposition, and Israel declared statehood the next year, the first Arab-Israeli war was locked in. These were the years that Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe: roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled, hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, and thousands were killed, with many of the horrifying truths about these atrocities finally escaping Israel’s own Shadow Lands in recent years. Of course Palestinians would resist such ethnic cleaning with violence of their own. Yet rather than seeing Arab resistance for what it was—a nationalist, anti-colonial battle over land and self-determination (with some anti-Semitic elements, to be sure)—many influential Zionist leaders portrayed the entire Palestinian cause as nothing but more irrational Jew-hatred, a seamless continuation of the very same anti-Semitism that had resulted in the Holocaust, and that therefore needed to be crushed with the kind of militarized force that Jews had not been able to marshal in Nazi-controlled Europe. Within this imaginary, the Palestinian, as the Jew’s new eternal enemy, was treated as so illegitimate, so irrational, so other, that Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centuries, a process that continues to this day with ongoing home demolitions, Israeli settlement expansions, targeted assassinations, settler rampages through Palestinian communities, openly discriminatory laws, and walled ghettos into which Palestinians are corralled.

In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan. Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.

Remember WWJD? What would Jesus do? It’s a fine question, but a much better question is WWJDIHWM? What would Jesus do if he were me? Why is it better? Because the odds are that you’re not a first-century, celibate Jewish rabbi; you’re a twenty-first-century mom, freshman at uni, VP of a startup, freelance graphic designer, or my secret dream—a luchador. It’s a bit hard to ask WWJD if your current work is raising a two-year-old or teaching kindergarten or writing software or designing the HVAC system for a new building downtown—much less doing any of the latter while raising your two-year-old. Instead, ask this: How would Jesus live if he had my gender, place, personality profile, age, life stage, job, resources, and address? How would he show up to the world? How would he handle _______? For

On May 14, 1948, Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, the first in two thousand years. The US government recognized its legitimacy on the same day; but Washington’s backing for Israel was not benevolent. To understand the thinking at the time, the essay by George Biddle, a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, published in the Atlantic in 1949 after his visit to the new nation, is instructive. Biddle was unequivocal in his endorsement of Israel, arguing that Western interests in the Middle East would be assured if the Jewish state was in its orbit. He did not seem to like Jews much, writing that they used to be “grease-spotted” and “moth-eaten.” But after arriving in Israel they suddenly acquired “physical beauty, healthy vitality, politeness, good nature” and were akin to US president, founding father, and slave owner Thomas Jefferson.13 Biddle dismissed the Arabs he saw but thought they were “about as dangerous as so many North American Indians.” Not being white, they were “foul, diseased, smelling, rotting, and pullulating with vermin.

Returning specifically to Christianity, I must note a central fact of the entire religion:  The Bible is an entirely Jewish document.  Front to back, cover to cover, A to Z, Old Testament and New—the Bible is an entirely Jewish document.  The morality, the theology, the social attitudes, the worldview…all thoroughly Jewish.  The Old Testament obviously so; it was written by Jews, about Jews, and for Jews.  The same holds with the New Testament, although with a slight twist:  it was written by Jews, about Jews, but for non-Jews.  This twist is crucial to the whole Jesus story.

Universities and schools were also dominated by the Jewish spirit. Jewish pornographers and quasi-scientists were widely received as bearers of new and fruitful ideas. The most notorious of them were two sexual specialists Max Hodann and Wilhelm Reich, who was employed as a permanent lecturer at the University of Oslo and had a large congregation in the capital and across the country. These two Jewish pornographers were among Norwegian youth for years, under the protection of the ruling party, carried out destructive activities under Hirschfeld's sexual program - primarily among working-class youth, and were adored by "liberated" decadent intellectuals. Reich, had his own "research institute" in Oslo, where he conducted his sexual experiments. He even went so far as to ask the director of an insane asylum to use the insane for this criminal experiments in the sexual field. The psychoanalysis of the Jew Freud also had a great and harmful influence. "Modern child rearing" was also inspired by the same circles.

The September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York and Washington turbocharged Israel’s defense sector and internationalized the war on terror that the Jewish state had been fighting for decades. On the night of the attack, former Prime Minister Netanyahu was asked on American TV what the attacks had meant for relations between the two nations. “It’s very good,” he immediately said. He quickly corrected himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He thought that the assault might “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”8 Seven years later, in April 2008, Netanyahu gave a speech at Israel’s Bar Ilan University and reiterated the same message. “We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” he said. These events had “swung American public opinion in our favor.

In eighth grade, despite Lansky’s fantastic aptitude, he dropped out of school and joined Luciano’s gang. By then, Luciano had already made friends with Frank Costello (known then by his real name, Francesco Castiglia), and Lansky brought into the gang his fellow Jewish friend Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. A year later World War I started,2 and though Lansky was just fifteen years old, the four boys were having success as stickup men and thieves and making more money than they could deal with. Luciano was the brains and the leader, Costello made important connections, Siegel was the brawn, and Lansky was the accountant. It was a fruitful partnership, and the four of them were sitting on a pile of cash just waiting to invest in something. Then, after World War I, the US government solved that problem for them when they passed the eighteenth Amendment, which started Prohibition. 3 Soon after, Lansky split off and started his own gang with Siegel called the “Bugs and Meyer Mob.” Lansky was ambitious, and while the Bugs and Meyer Mob worked with Luciano and Costello frequently, the gangs of New York were still largely divided along racial lines. Lansky recruited other Jews from the neighborhood, and together they provided trucks and protection for the movement of alcohol. They also shook down Jewish moneylenders and made them pay tribute. But of all the rackets that Lansky ran, the most notorious was his murder-for-hire business that the press called “Murder Inc.

According to Steve, an agreement had been struck between the young Salafists and the administration. All of a sudden, two years ago, the hoodlums and dealers had all vanished from the neighborhood. Supposedly that was the proof. Had this agreement included a clause banning Jewish organizations from campus? Again, there was nothing to substantiate the rumor, but the fact was that, as of last fall, the Jewish Students Union had no representatives on any Paris campus, while the youth division of the Muslim Brotherhood had opened new branches, here and there, across the city.

And yet, by 1906, nearly ninety thousand Jews were arriving in New York City every year, most of them from Russia and Poland. (Because the Russians and the Poles seemed indistinguishable, all these immigrants were grouped as “Russians.”) Now the Jewish population of the city stood at close to a million, or roughly twenty-five percent of the total population, and by 1915 there would be nearly a million and a half, or twenty-eight percent. In sheer

On the Jewish side, the war years passed in the shadow of the White Paper, with its restrictions on immigration, a ban on most land purchases, and the prospect of an independent state in which the Jews would become a permanent minority. David Ben-Gurion famously pledged to ‘fight the White Paper as if there were no war and to fight the war as if there were no White Paper’. He also declared that just as the First World War had given birth to the Balfour Declaration, this new conflict should give the Jews their own state. Even before news of mass killings of Jews began to filter out of Nazi-occupied Europe, facilitating illegal immigration had become a preoccupation for Zionist institutions. Running the British blockade became a national mission. In November 1940, a rickety ship called the Patria sank in Haifa harbour after Haganah operatives miscalculated the force of a bomb they had planted. The intention had been to cripple the vessel and prevent the deportation of its Jewish passengers, but in the event three hundred drowned. Far worse was to come. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference in Berlin secretly drew up operational plans for Hitler’s ‘final solution’. In February, an old cattle transport called the Struma was hit by a mine or torpedo and sank in the Black Sea, where it had been sent by the Turkish authorities after the British refused to transfer its Romanian Jewish refugees to Palestine. This time the death toll was 768, a grim dramatization of the plight of Jews fleeing for their lives and the impossibility of relying on British goodwill. ‘The Zionists,’ said Moshe Shertok, ‘do not mean to exploit the horrible tragedy of the Jews of Europe but they cannot refrain from emphasising the fact that events have totally proven the Zionist position on the solution of the Jewish problem. Zionism predicted the Holocaust decades ago.

The next expulsion occurred in 1322, when Philip V died. His successor, Charles IV, expelled the Jews and replaced them with the Lombards as licensed moneylenders until they were also expelled in 1330.41 In 1360, the Jews were invited to resettle in France. At the time, during the Hundred Years’ War, King John II of France was held prisoner in England. As ransom, he had to pay three million gold crowns. To help put together this enormous sum of money, Charles the Dauphin decided to recall the Jews and grant them a new charter for twenty years. On admission, each head of family had to

Turn in the Old Testament to the book of Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39.” Birjandi then proceeded to walk them through a series of prophecies he said was widely known as the War of Gog and Magog. They revealed an apocalyptic showdown against Israel and the Jewish people that would be led by a nation called Magog. “There are quite a few clues that make it clear the nation referred to as Magog is modern-day Russia,” Birjandi said, “including the writings of Flavius Josephus, a Roman historian. But what’s critical for us to understand is Ezekiel 38:5. What is the first country mentioned that will form an alliance against Israel?” “Persia,” Ibrahim said. “Exactly,” Birjandi confirmed. “The ancient prophecies speak of a Russian-Iranian alliance sometime in the future. To many scholars, this has seemed very odd, given that for most of the last several thousand years, the Russians and we Iranians have never had such an alliance. Indeed, the leaders of these countries have hated each other. Until 1943, the Russians occupied parts of northern Iran. Under Khomeini, we prayed for Allah to bring judgment upon the heathen, godless, atheist Communists in the Kremlin. But then what happened? We suffered through eight years of the war with Iraq. We had lots of oil money but desperately needed new weapons. The Soviet Union imploded,

In his gold-and-white ballroom at 881 Fifth Avenue he held, for years, his famous New Year’s Eve parties.

The new arrivals from Eastern Europe were ragged, dirt-poor, culturally energetic, toughened by years of torment, idealistic, and socialistic.

The Palestine laboratory can only thrive if enough nations believe in its underlying premise. It’s unsurprising that repressive regimes want to mimic Israeli repression, using Israeli technology to oppress their own unwanted or restive populations, but the Jewish state craves Western approval to fully realize its diplomatic and military potential. Aside from the US, Germany is arguably the greatest prize of all. Israel helped Germany rehabilitate its shattered image after World War II, while Berlin grants legitimacy to a country that brutally occupies the Palestinians (a nonpeople in the eyes of successive German governments). Germany purchasing increasing amounts of Israeli defense equipment is just one way it can atone for its historical guilt. When Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas visited Germany in August 2022 and spoke alongside Chancellor Olaf Scholz, he accused Israel of committing “fifty Holocausts” against his people. The German establishment expressed outrage over the comment but the hypocrisy was clear; the Palestinians are under endless occupation but it’s only they who have to apologize. Germany has taken its love affair with Israel to dangerous, even absurd heights. The Deutsche Welle media organization updated its code of conduct in 2022 and insisted that all employees, when speaking on behalf of the organization or even in a personal capacity, must “support the right of Israel to exist” or face punishment, likely dismissal.40 After the Israeli military shot dead Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank city of Jenin in May 2022, German police banned a peaceful public vigil in Berlin because of what German authorities called an “immediate risk” of violence and anti-Semitic messaging. When protestors ignored this request and took to the streets to both commemorate Abu Akleh and Nakba Day, police arrested 170 people for expressing solidarity with Palestine. A Palestinian in Germany, Majed Abusalama, tweeted that he had been assaulted by the police. “I just left the hospital an hour ago with an arm sling to hold my shoulder after the German racist police almost dislocated my shoulder with their violent actions to us wearing Palestine Kuffiyas,” he wrote. “This is the new wave of anti-Palestinian everything in Berlin. Insane, right?” This followed years of anti-Palestinian incitement by the German political elite, from the German Parliament designating the BDS movement as anti-Semitic in 2019 to pressuring German institutions to refuse any space for pro-Palestinian voices, Jewish or Palestinian.41 The Palestinian intellectual Tariq Baconi gave a powerful speech in Berlin in May 2022 at a conference titled “Hijacking Memory: The Holocaust and the New Right.” He noted that “states like Germany have once again accepted Palestinians as collateral. Their oppression and colonization is a fair price to pay to allow Germany to atone for its past crimes.

This thriving new Jerusalem with 132,661 inhabitants by 1931, proved that British rule and Zionist immigration did help create a flourishing economy--and rising Arab immigration: more Arabs immigrated to Palestine than Jews, and the Arab population of Palestine increased by 10 %, twice as fast as that of Syria or Lebanon.*. In ten years, Jerusalem attracted 21,000 new Arabs and 20,000 new Jews.... *The Woodhead Commission of 1938 stated that between 1918 and 1938, the Arab population of Palestine had increased by 419,000, the Jewish population by 343,000.

In the years before the founding of the state, the kibbutzim were an effective tool for establishing a Jewish presence and, after 1948, for establishing Israeli sovereignty over tracts of empty or abandoned and appropriated land, as well as for marking the new country’s boundaries.

On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.

the Jewish Agency and they had agreed to allocate from the next immigrant ship twenty-four Moroccans to Kibbutz Makor for work at the dig. “They’ll be pretty rough diamonds,” Eliav warned. “No English. No education.” “If they speak Arabic I can handle them,” Tabari assured the leaders, and two nights later the team went to greet the large ship that plied monotonously back and forth across the Mediterranean hauling Jewish immigrants to Israel. “Before we go aboard,” Eliav summarized, “I’ve got to warn you again that these aren’t the handsome young immigrants that you accept in America, Cullinane. These are the dregs of the world, but in two years we’ll make first-class citizens of them.” Cullinane said he knew, but if he had realized how intellectually unprepared he was for the cargo of this ship, he would have stayed at the tell and allowed Tabari to choose the new hands. For the ship that came to Israel that night brought with it not the kind of people that a nation would consciously select, not the clean nor the healthy nor the educated. From Tunisia came a pitiful family of four, stricken with glaucoma and the effects of malnutrition. From Bulgaria came three old women so broken they were no longer of use to anyone; the communists had allowed them to escape, for they had no money to buy bread nor skills to earn it nor teeth to eat it with. From France came not high school graduates with productive years ahead of them, but two tragic couples, old and abandoned by their children, with only the empty days to look forward to, not hope. And from the shores of Morocco, outcast by towns in which they had lived for countless generations, came frightened, dirty, pathetic Jews, illiterate, often crippled with disease and vacant-eyed. “Jesus Christ!” Cullinane whispered. “Are these the newcomers?” He was decent enough not to worry about himself first—although he was appalled at the prospect of trying to dig with such assistance—but he did worry about Israel. How can a nation build itself strong with such material? he asked himself. It was a shocking experience, one that cut to the heart of his sensibilities: My great-grandfather must have looked like this when he came half-starved from Ireland. He thought of the scrawny Italians that had come to New York and the Chinese to San Francisco, and he began to develop that sense of companionship with Israel that comes very slowly to a Gentile: it was building itself of the same human material that America was developed upon; and suddenly he felt a little weak. Why were these people seeking a new home coming to Israel and not to America? Where had the American dream faltered? And he saw that Israel was right; it was taking people—any people—as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer from a tired America.

First, most biblical scholars believe that the language Jesus and his disciples, as well as the Apostle Paul, spoke was an Old Galilean Aramaic or Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, which is a dialect of the Western Aramaic known as a Northern dialect. There are many modern Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, but no known Western dialect exists today. It is believed to be a dead language, although, in recent years, three villages in Syria, it was discovered, still speak a dialect known as the Ma’lula dialect, which is believed to be a descendent of the Western dialect and possibly closely related to the Old Galilean. This dialect is being studied, and grammars have been written and discarded. There is just no real certainty other than a few grammatical points as to whether we have a comprehensive knowledge of the language that Jesus spoke.

Even in those days I was struck by a thought which I confess has more of a hold on me than moral outrage about the great crime. It is the absurdity of the whole thing, of the senselessness and waste of those murders and deportations which we call Holocaust, Shoah, “Final Solution” (in quotation marks), the Jewish catastrophe – new terms, one after the other, because the words decay even as we use them. The irrationality of it all, how easily it could have been prevented, how nobody profited from my carrying rails for a railroad that was never finished, instead of attending school. Again and again I think: chance, accident. I know as much as the next person how this catastrophic breakdown of what we took for European civilization came about, but the historical backdrop doesn't really explain how a 12-year old girl ended up in Christianstadt, sentenced to do men's work, and of course doing it poorly, so that her contribution to the war effort was worthless to the exploiters. Our explanations amount to no more than a shopping list of previous events. And the sum under the bottom line is made to be the inevitable result of what stands above.

Before the establishment of the Israeli state, Palestinians owned 90 percent of all land in Mandatory Palestine. Most of this land was seized and incorporated into Israel. “From 1948 to 1953, the five years following the establishment of the state, 350 (out of a total of 370) new Jewish settlements were built on land owned by Palestinians,” writes Noura Erakat in her book Justice for Some.

Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correct a nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion and urgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protect its religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish Holy Land of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades made right.

I asked Professor Manning to describe in her own words some of the more significant things that she has learned from all of her conversations with secular parents over the years. Is there anything that secular parents have in common? “A key pattern that I uncovered in my research—and this applies to parents from all over the country, and it held, overall, in all of my interviews—is that secular parents value the idea of having choices. This emphasis on having choices just really stands out. Secular parents want their children to have a choice about what to believe in and what to practice. And this makes them quite different from religious parents. You know, your typical Catholic parent will send their kids to CCD—catechism class—and Jewish parents will send their kids to Hebrew school, and what they want is to pass on their own worldview. But secular parents do not necessarily want their kids to turn out secular. Rather, what they talk about, what they emphasize is, ‘I want my son or daughter to be able to freely choose his or her own worldview.’ So many secular parents will even try to expose them to religion because they think it would help them make their own choices.

Flavius Josephus, the well-known historian of the Jewish people, was born in A. D. 37, only two years after the death of Jesus; but though his work is of inestimable value as our chief authority for the circumstances of the times in which Jesus and his Apostles came forward, yet he does not seem to have ever mentioned Jesus himself. At any rate, the passage in his 'Jewish Antiquities' that refers to him is certainly spurious, and was inserted by a later and a Christian hand. The Talmud compresses the history of Jesus into a single sentence, and later Jewish writers concoct mere slanderous anecdotes.

And here I return to Christianity. Why be a Christian in the twenty-first century? Because it gives us a vision. And a hope. And a way. The language of the New Testament talks about the “kingdom of God.” Which is here, now. Which is what this world would be like if God was king and Caesar was not. The vision of Christianity for a just, sane, nonviolent world is not utopian. It is within our capacity. And such capacity requires that we take up the crucible of transformation. Transformation, individually and collectively, is the key ingredient for liberation. Without our participation in transformation and embodying lives of compassion, the kingdom of God will not come. It is up to us, and we are not alone. . . . . As a benediction, I close with this passage from the Jewish Sabbath Prayer Book: Days, pass, and the years vanish, And we walk sightless among miracles. Fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, Like lightening, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, “How filled with awe is this place. . .” Marianne Borg – intro to Days of Awe and Wonder, Marcus Borg.

And here I return to Christianity. Why be a Christian in the twenty-first century? Because it gives us a vision. And a hope. And a way. The language of the New Testament talks about the “kingdom of God.” Which is here, now. Which is what this world would be like if God was kind and Caesar was not. The vision of Christianity for a just, sane, nonviolent world is not utopian. It is within our capacity. And such capacity requires that we take up the crucible of transformation. Transformation, individually and collectively, is the key ingredient for liberation. Without our participation in transformation and embodying lives of compassion, the kingdom of God will not come. It is up to us, and we are not alone. . . . . As a benediction, I close with this passage from the Jewish Sabbath Prayer Book: Days, pass, and the years vanish, And we walk sightless among miracles. Fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, Like lightening, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, “How filled with awe is this place. . .” Marianne Borg – intro to Days of Awe and Wonder, Marcus Borg.

I look at the spread on the counter. I took Jacob's advice and went all out on the classic Southern good luck New Year's foods. In addition to my medium-rare porterhouse, there is hoppin' John over buttered Carolina gold rice, slow-cooked collard greens, corn pudding. The black-eyed peas are good luck in the Southern tradition but also in the Jewish, albeit not usually cooked with bacon the way these are. The greens are supposed to represent money, the corn represents gold. We're closing on the house this week, and I'll take whatever good luck I can find to start the New Year, hoping for a career resurrection and some personal clarity. There is a pan of three-layer slutty brownies sitting on the counter, chocolate chip cookie on the bottom, a layer of Oreos in the middle, brownie batter on top with swirls of cream cheese.

How soon is too soon to date? I heard about a woman in England who lost her husband and began dating his best friend four weeks later. People were shocked at how quickly her new romance started. Her mother-in-law cut off communication with her and many of her friends did too. "Blame me if you like," the woman said, "but grief hits people in different ways and I have no regrets." When you are widowed, people pity you and want your sorrow to end. But if you start dating, sometimes they judge you and think maybe your sorrow ended just a wee bit too soon. A childhood friend of mine who is now a rabbi told me that in the Jewish religion, mourning for a parent, child, or sibling is a year, but mourning for a spouse is just thirty days. "The rabbis wanted people to move forward," he said.

The sense that I'd fled my Jewishness in Odessa added painful new pressure to the dilemma I would face at sixteen. That's when each Soviet citizen first got an internal passport - the single most crucial identity document. As a child of mixed ethnicities - Jewish mom, Russian dad - I'd be allowed to select either for Entry 5. This choice-to-come weighed like a stone on my nine-year-old soul. Would I pick difficult honor and side with the outcasts, thereby dramatically reducing my college and job opportunities? Or would I take the easy road of being 'Russian'? Our emigration rescued me from the dilemma, but the unmade choice haunts me to this day. What would I have done?

In high school, I developed a new love: acting. I went to a predominantly black and Latino school in Compton and, outside of television, this was my first true immersion in black culture. I had an inspiring drama teacher, a Jewish man who found the most amazing, hidden plays of color. There was On Striver’s Row, a play about an upper-middle-class black family in Harlem. Maricela de la Luz Lights the World, a fanciful and mystical Latino drama by José Rivera. And so much more. Every year for four years I was introduced to new diverse works, all while working with a multicultural cast. I only wish Hollywood could take a lesson from Compton. The

The Franks’ decision to go into hiding was not, however, an unusual one. Of the Jews living in Holland between 1942 and 1943, twenty thousand and perhaps as many as thirty thousand—the estimates vary widely—saw going into hiding as their only alternative to deportation. “We are quite used to the idea of people in hiding, or ‘underground,’ as in bygone days one was used to Daddy’s bedroom slippers warming in front of the fire,” Anne noted (Jan. 28, 1944; vers. B/C). But the way the Franks went into hiding was by no means typical. Most families separated, with the parents entrusting their children to the care of organized resistance groups. They drummed new family names into the chilren’s heads, names that didn’t sound Jewish, and arranged for them to live with people who—at least to the children—were utter strangers. The adults sought out other refugees. Most married couples had to separate. Very few of those who went into hiding could rely on the kind of loyal, well-organized team of helpers the Franks had, selfless people whom they had known for years and who not only provided them with essentials but also stood by them as friends, even bringing them gifts on their birthdays and holidays.

Located on 9th Avenue in New York City, B& H Photo is the largest non-chain photo and video equipment store in the United States and the second largest in the world —only Yodobashi Camera in downtown Tokyo is bigger. The owners, along with many of their employees, are Hasidic Jews who dress just as their eighteenth-century ancestors did in Eastern Europe. On any given day, 8,000 to 9,000 people pass through the front door. Yet 70 percent of their business is online, serviced by a 200,000-square-foot warehouse located nearby in Brooklyn. Even in a competitive marketplace, B& H won’t conduct business on the Sabbath or on about a half-dozen Jewish holidays during the year. They close their doors at 1 p.m. on Fridays and keep them closed all day Saturday, the biggest shopping day of the week. During Sabbath, customers can peruse the B& H website, but they can’t make an online order. Recently a customer asked the B& H director of communications how they could close not just the retail store but also the website on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the busiest shopping day of the year. The director simply replied, “We respond to a higher authority.” 17

The B’nai B’rith is established by Jews in New York City as a Masonic Lodge. 70 years later this group will establish the notorious Anti-Defamation League, designed to promote any critics of Jewish supremacism or criminality, as, "anti-Semitic.

The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish text, which indeed elaborates on the cryptic verse from Genesis 6:4: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterwards—when the sons of God went into the daughters of men.” While scholars disagree about when the book was actually written (with some putting it at ca. 300 B.C.), the book is cited in the New Testament Letter of Jude and the First Letter of Peter, and copies of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book was clearly known to first-century Jews and Christians but was considered apocryphal by St. Augustine, among others, and disappeared for more than a thousand years. By the tenth century, the Book of Enoch would have been considered a lost work of scripture, only to be rediscovered centuries later, in 1773, by the Scottish explorer James Bruce during his travels in Abyssinia (Ethiopia).

Arnold had never given much thought to whether or not he loved America—but now it seemed pretty obvious to him that he didn’t. Not in the way Nathan Hale had loved America. Or even in the way his late father, a Dutch-Jewish refugee, had loved America. In fact, he found the idea of sacrificing his life for his country somewhat abhorrent. Moreover, it wasn’t that he disliked abstract loyalties in general. He loved New York, for instance: Senegalese takeout at three a.m., and strolling through the Botanical Gardens on the first crisp day of autumn, and feeding the peacocks at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. If Manhattan were invaded—if New Jersey were to send an expeditionary force of militiamen across the Hudson River—he’d willingly take up arms to defend his city. He also loved Sandpiper Key in Florida, where they owned a time-share, and maybe Brown University, where he’d spent five years of graduate school. But the United States? No one could mistake his qualified praise for love.

some many differences in each translation of the Bible. The answer to that can be anything from a translator reading his own theological persuasion, bias or prejudice into his translations to the purpose and/or intention behind the translation. By this I mean is the translator going for a literal word of word translation, attempting to put his translation into modern thought, trying to put his translation into a cultural context, trying to present a paraphrase, a commentary or any number of different purposes and/or intentions for working on a new translation. Ultimately, the answer as to why there are so many different translations lies in something that happened almost two thousand and five hundred years ago. From 597 BC to 538 BC the Jewish nation was taken into captivity. During this captivity time the language of Jewish people, which was Hebrew, assimilated into the Babylonian culture and Hebrew became a dead language, preserved only for ceremonial purposes. A dead language means that it is no longer a language used for

The technology of the codex did not reach the point of being able to hold anything close to an entire canon of Jewish and Christian Scriptures until the fourth century. Nor was there any such thing as a closed canon of those Scriptures until that time. The closing of the canon and the binding of it into a single big book seems to have gone hand in hand. ... The main point I want to make here is that neither Jesus nor his followers nor Paul nor any of the authors of any of the texts now in the New Testament, let alone any Christians who lived during the first three hundred years of Christianity, could possibly have imagined the Bible, a single book containing a closed canon of Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It was both physically and socially impossible. Not only were there just too many different varieties of Christianity with too many different important writings with too many variants in too many different languages; there was simply no medium to bear anything close to that large of a library. It took the twin emergences of a top-down imperial Christianity and a big enough book to make the Bible possible.

the Jews should stay away from this trial -- for their own sake. For -- mark this well -- the charge "a war for the Jews" is still being made, and in the post-war years it will be made again and again. The too-large percentage of Jewish men and women here will be cited as proof of this charge. Sometimes it seems that the Jews will never learn about these things. They seem intent on bringing new difficulties down on their own heads. I do not like to write about this matter... but I am disturbed about it. They are pushing and crowding and competing with each other, and with everyone else. They will try the case I guess... --Letters from Nuremberg, page 135

The Binding of Isaac and the Binding of You and Me With Rosh Hashanah coming in a few weeks, it is a good time to think about some of its important lessons. The High Holy Days are a time to evaluate our relationship with important people in our lives. We ask their forgiveness, they ask ours, and if there is regret for past faults and insensitive acts (Tradition calls them “sins”), we lend forgiveness to others, and they to us. Rosh Hashanah is also a time to think about our relation with our Tradition, with Judaism. It is the Jewish New Year, and a time to reexamine where we stand with regard to the faith/culture/civilization we call Judaism. Those hearing these words have already taken significant steps toward solidifying their Jewish connections by joining a synagogue, coming to religious worship, and doing many other Jewish things in our lives. Take a few moments—even a few hours—to think about and discuss your Jewish values and priorities with your loved ones and intellectual sparring partners. How can you deepen and strengthen your Jewish ties and commitments in the coming year? Perhaps that is why we are bidden to hear the sound of the Shofar each morning for thirty days during the month of Elul, before Rosh Hashanah, as well as on the New Year itself. The Talmud, in tractate “Rosh Hashanah” (16a), tells us: “Rabbi Abahu said: Why do we use the horn of a ram on Rosh Hashanah? Because the Blessed Holy One is saying to us: If you blow a horn from a ram before Me on Rosh Hashanah, I will be reminded of the act of ultimate faith performed by Avraham when he was ready to carry out my demand, even though a ram was eventually sacrificed in place of Yitzhak. The merit of Avraham will reflect merit on you, his descendants. In fact, when you blow the Shofar, and I remember the Binding (Hebrew: Akedah) of Yitzhak I will attribute to you the merit of having bound (Hebrew: akad-tem) yourselves to me. As we begin to blow the Shofar each morning, from the first day of the Hebrew month of Elul, let’s begin to think about how we bind ourselves to God. About our Jewish boundaries, the ties that bind us to our Jewish past. Let’s think of how our ritual lives can be enriched and enhanced with more song, custom, prayer and ceremony. Let’s think of how we can give ourselves to more Jewish causes (Israel, Jewish education, the synagogue), and how being Jewish can help bind and tie us to the needs of humanity (the environment, the needs of our community, the eradication of poverty and injustice). Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The letter was given to Sharon by Bush to help Sharon justify his unilateral withdrawal of 9,480 Jewish residents and the Israeli Army from Gaza, as part of a ‘peace’ effort to create a new separate Palestinian state, as part of a future ‘two state solution’. Sharon relied on Bush’s letter. In the letter, Bush made four promises to Israel: 1.) The borders of the new Muslim state to be created would not encompass the entire West Bank (referring to Israel as “Judea” and “Samaria,” including Jerusalem), despite Muslim leaders demanding the complete withdrawal from the areas Israel captured when it was invaded in 1967; 2.) Jewish towns and villages in the West Bank would be incorporated into the borders of Israel; 3.) Muslims would have to forego their demand to be given the right to immigrate to Israel; and 4.) Israel’s existence as a Jewish state would be assured. Unfortunately, four years later, in 2008, the Bush administration abandoned these assurances made to Prime Minister Sharon in 2004. Secretary of State Rice told reporters in Israel on the occasion of Israel’s 60th Anniversary as a re-born State that the 2004 letter “talked about realities at that time. And there are realities for both sides…” In an interview in the Oval Office with David Horowitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, President Bush had to be reminded of the letter by his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, who said in briefings that “Israel has tried to overstate the importance of a rather vague letter.” (Jerusalem Post, May 14, 2008).

The Torah, like other ancient law codes, assigns the death penalty to many proscribed behaviors besides murder—including adultery, rape of a betrothed woman, giving insult or injury to one’s parents, witchcraft, male homosexuality, and public profanation of the Sabbath. By the second century C.E., however, the Talmudic rabbis, whose debates and rulings constitute the main body of Halakha, had virtually nullified the death penalty. The Mishnah (the codification of law that forms the core text of the Talmud) states, “A Sanhedrin [governing council] that puts a man to death once in seven years is called destructive. Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah says: even once in seventy years. Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon say: had we been in the Sanhedrin none would ever have been put to death” (Makkot 7A). Even in murder cases, the Torah’s requirement of two eyewitnesses for a sentence of death was interpreted by the Talmudic rabbis to make capital punishment highly unlikely: the murderer’s own confession could not be accepted as evidence, and the two eyewitnesses were required also to have warned the criminal beforehand that he would be executed! Justice tempered by mercy thus became the Jewish ideal.