Sometimes in life, and in history, it is time to step back and reflect. I have seen five rounds of conflict since I moved to Israel, all of them inconclusive. For me this raises the question – war, what is it good for? photo from: www.flickr.com/photos/105105658@N03/30502660157Rav MikeJewish HistoryWar
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The Holocaust was so dark and vast that the Jews struggled to integrate it into their consciousness, despite the hundreds of thousands of survivors in their midst. One of the turning points in even addressing this issue was the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution. He was taken and tried,…
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Life offers so few opportunities to stop and reflect that we need to seize every chance. What better time to look back at the questions with which we began this season than in Israel’s tenth year. Here is an episode which once again takes a look at questions which drive the three dimensions of the…
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Sukkot is a time to sit in the Sukkah and reflect, so here are a few thoughts from my Sukkah. This is an exploration of what it means for the state of Israel to be a kingdom and and it what means to be a client state. Picture from www.flickr.com/photos/adforce1/2462794123podcast
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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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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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