The High Holy Days are also know as the Days of Awe which can be awesome, or awful. Here is a look at how to tie the work of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot together into an approach to building a world whose horizon is big enough to hold our dreams.
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The Sinai campaign was many things – a preemptive strike against Israel’s enemies, the last gasp of colonialism in the Middle East and a complete failure of international law. This episode explores the 1956 war from all these angles.
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The clock is counting down toward the 1956 Sinai Campaign. Before we can tell that story the threads of the Cold War, infiltration and post-colonial politics have to come together.
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The 1950’s were a formative time in Israeli history. The Cold War was getting hot, internal politics were volatile, and the it seemed as if the War of Independence had not quite ended. To Israel’s leaders, there was nothing more important than maintaining a strong posture, even though this may have meant that they were…
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The focus of our story has returned to the land of Israel, where it is once again a time of controversy. Despite the population growth, the economic hardships and the security challenges, the most divisive political issue of the early 1950’s was whether to accept reparations from the reborn German state. Here is an exploration…
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Some timely questions for a difficult day. How do we reach redemption if we don’t know what it looks like? How do we transform suffering into a source of positive identity? And what does it look like to turn our mourning into joy?
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Taking a break from the flow of history to think about a pressing current issue. Where does the breakdown of classic understandings of identity and authority associated with the postmodern age leave Am Yisrael? If you want to watch the second half of the webinar on this topic and hear about the blessings of postmodernism,…
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We spoke about the suburbs and the shadows, now it is time to talk about Zionism. The ‘Golden decade’ was a time of reorganization in general, and particularly in relation to the newborn State of Israel. Here is an episode whose characters will seem strikingly familiar today – non-Zionists, Zionists and anti-Zionists.
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The decade after World War Two was a Jewish decade for America. Not only did the Jews achieve the suburban dream, but their culture stepped right into the middle of the American mainstream. Nonetheless, there were two things which dimmed this Golden Decade – the Red Scare and the shadow of the Shoah.
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1945 to 1955 is known as the ‘Golden Decade’ of American Jewry. Here is the first of three episodes that aim to fill in the Jewish Story on the western side of the Atlantic. The question for today is – did the move to suburbia make the Jews white?
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