It’s almost impossible to describe, for those who’ve never done is, what it is like to watch the national Yom Hashoah ceremony on Israeli TV. The air in the room feels too thick to breathe. The speeches say nothing new (for what hasn’t already been said?), the music is simultaneously beautiful and heartrending. Then come the stories: six individual people, six worlds destroyed, six lives rebuilt, six human beings who through luck and grit actually survived. It’s difficult – actually, impossible – to speak. The siren the next morning is the perfect response. Stillness and silence – because no words suffice. Like the Biblical Aaron when he lost his sons, the very best that we can ...

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Modern Arab Studies at my alma mater, Columbia University, had this to say on the pages of The New York Times (March 12) before Barack Obama arrived in Jerusalem: “For Mr. Obama, a decision is in order. He can reconcile the United States to continuing to... bankroll an unjust status quo that it helped produce. Or he can begin to chart a new course based on recognition that the United States must forthrightly oppose the occupation and the settlements... There is no middle way.” Mr. Khalidi is wrong. There is, in fact, a middle way. It is the way that the Obama administration should have adopted long ago. In this middle ...

With coalition negotiations still capturing the headlines, it is all too easy to forget that yet another election looms in Israel. Though this will be one in which most of us cannot vote, it too may exert tremendous influence on the future of the Jewish state. These elections will be for the chief rabbis of Israel. Interestingly, for the first time in many, many years, the upcoming elections (no official date has been set yet) are actually arousing interest in sectors outside ultra- Orthodox circles, because of the candidacy of Rabbi David Stav. The minute Rabbi Stav walks into the room, you cannot help but sense that you’re in the presence of a different kind of ...

Between the Jewish holidays of the fall, on the one hand, and those of the spring and summer, on the other, lie two additional holidays which seemingly have nothing to do with each other: Hanukkah and Purim.  Despite their many obvious differences, Hanukkah and Purim share a number of characteristics.  They are the two primary post-biblical holidays, nowhere even hinted at in the Torah.  And in terms of their political implications, they are opposite sides of the same coin.  One focuses on Jewish survival through the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem; the other focuses on the challenges of Jewish survival in the Diaspora.  Thus, both raise the critical question of why the Jewish ...

If Limmud is so fascinating, why do I usually find myself leaving it with such mixed emotions? What is it about this multi-denominational, volunteer-led, creative out-of- the-box experience that renders me so conflicted, whether I attend it in Nottingham or New York, Los Angeles or (later this year) Australia? The answer actually has nothing to do with Limmud, and everything to do with the country to which I return when I depart it. Limmud is one of those places where the silos come tumbling down, where the whole point is to encounter Jews who are very much unlike us, and with that encounter, to accept and even embrace the discomfort that such encounters often ...

Much has been said and written about Ed Koch since his recent passing, but one aspect of his life that has eluded the commentators is his little-known role in educating American Jews about the role of Menachem Begin and the Irgun Zva’i Leumi in bringing about the creation of Israel. When Begin first visited the United States in the autumn of 1948, as the recently emerged leader of the Jewish fighting underground and the Israeli opposition, he was a stranger in a strange land. Most mainstream American Jewish leaders were ideologically more comfortable with David Ben- Gurion and the Labor Zionists, and they followed Ben-Gurion’s lead in treating Begin as a pariah. None attended the Manhattan ...

Israeli voters went to the polls last week with a sense of impending crisis. How they responded tells us a great deal not only about Israelis themselves, but about what how the international community ought to respond if it still harbors hope for peace in our region. Though pundits predicted a ho-hum election, the results were dramatic. The two major stories were the significant weakening of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, which lost considerable ground, and the rise of the previously unknown Yair Lapid, who is a staunch centrist and, suddenly, a major player. All the predictions had been that Israelis would move to the right. They did precisely the opposite. Why did observers assume Israel ...

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, past president of the Union for Reform Judaism, recently published an open letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu demanding that he advance Jewish religious pluralism in Israel. “[The] failure of Israel to offer recognition and support for the streams of Judaism with which the great majority of American Jews identify is nothing less than a disgrace,” Yoffie wrote. “American Jews...have had enough. [T]hey will no longer tolerate that Reform and Conservative rabbis are scorned and despised in Israel; they will no longer sit silently while Israel’s official representatives offend them and denigrate their religious practices.... The angry voices are... coming from the heart of American Jewish leadership.” He suggested, “You could point out that only two million ...

"What was the hardest thing about making aliya?” people still ask me. They expect, I imagine, that I’ll say something about our kids going to the army. Or about living in less than half the space we had when we lived in the States. Or, if they knew, they might imagine that I’d mention having one car for four drivers, rather than two cars for two drivers. For me, though, it’s not that. What’s been hardest has been watching the worldview on which I was raised crash and break like a ship washed violently against a forbidding shore. I was raised in one of those (then-) classic American Jewish ...

New Year’s Eve 2063. Israel is 115 years old. The Jewish State is much as it was in 2013, only more so. Iran still wants a bomb, but the United States and Western European powers insist that as long as the mullahs threaten Israel and the West, they will have only civil nuclear power. Grudgingly Iran continues to allow international monitoring. Half a century has passed since the “civil but not military” compromise narrowly avoided Israel’s 2013 red line. Israel’s not terribly happy about the compromise, but not terribly unhappy, either. Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt are all firmly in the hands of the Islamists, but of the mild variety, Erdogan-esque. No love lost with Israel in those quarters, but matters are ...