After an overdose of local news a few nights ago, I went onto Amazon and typed in “shame.” As I expected, all I could find were books about overcoming shame, how to move beyond it. The top hit was Healing the Shame that Binds You, but there were many more: Letting Go of Shame or Healing the Shame We Don’t Deserve, and so on. But isn’t there shame that we do deserve? What about learning to live with shame that is almost unbearable? Isn’t it precisely by becoming harrowingly aware of our faults and misdeeds that we become better people? Why no books about living with shame, rather than just getting beyond it? It’s not only ...

Khaled’s been our “fix-it” guy for a decade. When he was over recently, I came upon him in the living room as he was taking a break from his work. He was looking at a series of photographs on the wall, one of which is called “Rest in Pieces.” “What is this?” he asked. “It’s a Jewish cemetery in Argentina,” I told him. “See the Hebrew lettering on the tombstones?” “But why are the tombstones shattered?” “People broke them,” I explained. “But why would anyone do that?” “Because they hate Jews, I guess,” I told him. “Why?” And a moment later, “But these Jews were dead,” he said to me. “They hate dead Jews, ...

At long last, even if years too late, Israelis woke up this week to the realization that we face yet another existential threat. Yes, it took 100,000 “Men in Black” in downtown Jerusalem to make the point, but finally, we get it. As dangerous as are the delegitimization of Israel and the specter of a nuclear Iran, Israel is no less threatened by a growing population of religious fundamentalists who insist on the right to racial discrimination in their schools and who utterly reject the legitimacy and authority of the Supreme Court. They reject, in other words, the idea of a “Jewish and democratic” state. There’s more, of course, including their treatment of Sephardim (even ...

A Botched Raid, a Vital Embargo By DANIEL GORDIS June 3, 2010 Jerusalem IN the last few days, Jerusalem has been blanketed by an unusual combination of humiliation and steely determination. How is it, people here wondered aloud, that the same country that tripled its size in three lightning days in June 1967 and then pulled off the rescue at Entebbe nine years later now seems to botch everything? We lost the 2006 war in Lebanon, believing — incorrectly — that our venerated air force could win the war from the skies. The strikes on Gaza in December 2008 were a military success, but we have utterly failed to ...

An old high school friend, who’s taken great exception to a couple of my most recent Jerusalem Post columns, has been telling me of late on my Facebook page how out of touch with American Jewry I am.  He let loose again today.  Here’s what he had to say: Hey Danny....yet again a misguided Israeli political and military mission with regard to Gaza that American Jewry will be asked to stand by and support. All over the news Israel will be referred to as "the Jewish State" as worldwide condemnation will pour in. As a Jew I will be on the defensive despite the fact that I have no vote and no say in ...

THE JERUSALEM POST MAY 28 2010In October 1994, several days after kidnapped IDF soldier Nachshon Wachsman was killed in a failed attempt to save him from his terrorist captors, I was scheduled to teach my weekly graduate seminar at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. But given the horror of what had just transpired, I couldn’t even imagine simply teaching as planned. I no longer recall what had been scheduled for that day. But what I do remember is that I decided to scrap the usual fare and that I taught a text in memory of Wachsman. As the seminar drew to a close, it was obviously quiet in the ...

Imagine this, if you can. A prestigious university in the United States, with deep roots in the American Jewish community, invites Israel’s ambassador to deliver its annual commencement address. But instead of expressing pride in the choice of speaker and in the country that he represents, the university’s students, many of them Jewish, protest. They don’t want to hear from the ambassador. (See this Facebook page.)  He’s a “divisive” figure, the student newspaper argues, and the students deserved better. Tragically, of course, there’s nothing hypothetical about the scenario. Brandeis University recently decided to award honorary degrees to Michael Oren, Dennis Ross and Paul Simon, among others, at its May 23 commencement, and Ambassador ...

As I was departing the United States following a brief visit last week, the news being broadcast in the airport was preoccupied with Prime Minister Binyamin’s Netanyahu’s recent and apparently inadvertent snub of Vice President Joe Biden. Some 11 hours later, when I’d landed in Tel Aviv and was listening to the radio in the taxi on the way to Jerusalem, the news was of rioting in Jerusalem, the numbers of police officers injured, and the number of protesters detained during Hamas’s “Day of Rage.” On the American news, Hillary Clinton was calling for more than an apology, demanding “concrete steps” towards peace on Israel’s part. And in Israel, the fluent-Hebrew-speaking Arab protester interviewed on the radio was calling for armed resistance to Israel’s ...

By DANIEL GORDIS The Jerusalem Post 19/03/2010 It was only a matter of time until settlement construction – the issue that the Obama administration has chosen to situate at the very core of its Mideastpolicy, as if settlements have anything at all to do with decades of Palestinian recalcitrance – reared its proverbial head once again. But now that the issue is back, it’s time for some honesty on both sides of the political divide: The wisdom or folly of settlement construction is substantially less obvious than most observers are willing to acknowledge.Barack Obama, Joseph Biden and ...

Religious Zionism is in crisis … again. Or so we are being told. In the aftermath of the tragic allegations concerning Rabbi Mordechai (Motti) Elon, religious Zionists are bemoaning yet another crisis in the movement. It’s a crisis of trust in charismatic rabbinic leadership, some are saying. Others are asking whether the movement holds its leaders up to standards of such perfection that it is virtually impossible for any high-profile person to acknowledge misdeeds and to ask for help. Still others focus on what this latest round may do to the image of religious Zionism among rank-and-file Israelis. Important though these issues are, they are not the real crisis. The true crisis, which is wholly ...