Gershom Gorenberg Why sing Had Gadya at Seder tonight in pseudo-Aramaic when the version in real Italian is so gorgeous? I first heard it my first time from an Italian-speaking Swiss guest at a Seder at a teacher’s home 30 years ago, and have bringing the lyrics to Seder ever since. You can learn the [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new article on our prime minister’s disastrous trip to Washington is up at The American Prospect. Mr. Netanyahu wanted badly to go to Washington. He wanted to warm himself in the worship of thousands of delegates at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual convention, far from the cacophony of his unruly [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Rimon is a fantastic caterer. She has turned her talent at Kurdish-style cooking into a business through the help of Ahoti (My Sister), an organization that works with Israeli women from mizrahi (Middle Eastern) backgrounds to develop their economic potential. Ahoti is a grantee of the New Israel Fund. I mention this because [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg I’m feeling something akin to parental pride. One of my Columbia students, Seth Anziska,  has published an excellent opinion article at Foreign Policy’s new Middle East Channel: Reactions to the recent diplomatic squabble between the U.S. and Israel over building in East Jerusalem display a startling lack of historical memory. More than 30 [...]

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Haim Watzman My earliest memory: I am in the kitchen of our ranch house in Euclid, Ohio on a hot summer afternoon. My Aunt Bernice, wearing the largest, warmest, smile in my entire universe, has driven her snazzy scarlet and pearl-white Nash Metropolitan convertible over for a visit. She and my mother look remarkably alike, [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My own South Jerusalem congregation, Yedidya, is on the progressive end of Orthodoxy, and that’s where I’m comfortable. During some synagogue-hopping in New York, though, I came across the egalitarian community of Kehilat Hadar, part of the growing movement of independent minyanim, and it inspired some unexpected, unconventional optimism about the next generation [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My friend Aryeh Cohen has written a fascinating piece at Religion Dispatches on a convergence of traditional-leaning Jews and progressives. On the one hand, …what really stands out is the new, though cautious, embrace of social justice goals by the institutions of the Conservative and (to a much smaller extent) the Orthodox movements. [...]

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Haim Watzman “Just Egypt?” The chiseled-faced, bristle-haired field security sergeant, who looked every one of his nineteen years, fixed me with an intense, cold gaze. They practice that gaze in front of mirrors, I told myself, but my palms were sweating. It was early summer, 1987, and I’d received a brown envelope requesting that I [...]

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