Gershom Gorenberg I know that today is Tu Be’Av, the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av, an obscure holiday from the Second Temple period that has been secularized in Israel as the Day of Love – and that, according to Chana Pinchasi, should really be understood as an assertion of women’s freedom and a [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new piece is up at The American Prospect: Dror Etkes picked me up in front of the bank, next to the convenience store, on a normal Jerusalem street where nothing slows the morning commuters except normal traffic jams. I wanted to visit the Palestinian village of Silwad. To that, Etkes added a [...]

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Haim Watzman Here at South Jerusalem we’re proud that we provide our own commentary and eschew the “Wow! [link]” type of post that seems to typify so many blogs. But sometimes someone else says all there is to be said, in this case Yam Erez at Stand By Your Name. Yam, I await your thoughts [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Anshel Pfeffer’s article last week against fasting on Tisha Be’Av seemed written for me. I hate to fast. An old friend once told me that on Yom Kippur, he looks at my face in shul to get a real sense of suffering. Enough chastising the flesh. It makes you feel bad. ‘There is [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg The human rights group Hamoked has posted an online quiz about the conditions faced by Palestinians living under occupation. It’s worth testing yourself. Since I would never give away answers to a test, I won’t mention that the key to a perfect score is being grimly pessimistic.

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Gershom Gorenberg It’s a reminder to be careful, to avoid making even implied predictions. For the latest edition of Hadassah magazine, I wrote an article on Barack Obama’s relation to Israel. The idea that Obama is less committed to Israel than his predecessors is a “misconception,” I said very politely. (English provides a more forceful [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Busy researching a major writing project, I’ve had too little time in both the real and virtual South Jerusalem. So I’m only belatedly posting recent articles. Here’s a piece of my piece from the American Prospect, scoring the the raid on the Mavi Marmara: Hamas Ismail Haniye’s rejectionist government in Gaza could turn [...]

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Haim Watzman “Fire! Fire! The Temple’s on fire!” I cry out, waking myself up. Ilana rolls over and glares at me. “Calm down,” she says. “Your freedoms do not include shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded Temple.” “Ohmigod,” I say. “I had the weirdest nightmare.” “It must be something you didn’t eat,” Ilana suggests. “I was [...]

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Haim Watzman When I encountered Shahar Bram’s lyric “North of Boston” on the back page of Ha’aretz’s arts section last month, I was immediately struck by its plethora—celebration, really—of intertextuality and interlingual word play. A poem awash in allusions and puns that cross textual and linguistic boundaries is by definition impossible to render into any [...]

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Haim Watzman Downtown is closed off, and it looks like half the country is there. So’s my wife, Ilana, who as a soldier’s mother identifies completely with Shalit’s mother. Give Hamas whatever they want, just get the boy home. As much empathy as I feel for the Shalit family, I can’t agree with that call. [...]

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Haim Watzman The International Relations and Security Network, a Zurich-based information service for international relations and security professionals, interviewed me for its current special report on Israel. Hear me talk about Israeli democracy and Judaism, and please come back here to comment, object, question–and perhaps even concur–with my views. Just don’t be confused–the picture on [...]

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