Haim Watzman We were just getting on the New Jersey Turnpike when Danny Engel bent over his guitar and placed his lips on those of Debbie Lieberman. Both of them were sitting on the floor in the aisle of the crowded bus that was taking our Washington Metro Area Midrasha’s students back from a Chabad [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new piece is up at the Daily Beast: Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz lived on Ussishkin Street in Jerusalem. The street was named by Menachem Ussishkin himself. An early Zionist leader, prideful, pugnacious, Ussishkin headed the Jewish National Fund for nearly 20 years. In 1931 he built an imposing house on what was then [...]

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Haim Watzman My Dear Herr Kapellmeister, It’s spring here in Jerusalem. Fields, yards, and the few vacant lots that remain in this increasingly overbuilt city are burgeoning with blood-red anemones. Two weeks ago, Ilana and I visited a hill not too far away that is carpeted with purple lupines, growing over the ruins of an [...]

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Haim Watzman God knows how Eliezer’s mind works. It goes off into other dimensions every time I try to have a serious conversation with him. That’s what happened on Purim this year. I waited through the entire reading of the megillah, the Book of Esther, to point out to him Chapter 4, verse 14, which [...]

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Drafting the ultra-Orthodox is a diversion. It’s more important for their kids to learn math and English Gershom Gorenberg Prospect Magazine in the UK has posted my portrait of the crisis facing Israel’s haredim – and all the rest of us. “The system just isn’t relevant to life,” says Asher Gold. He wears black trousers, [...]

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Haim Watzman The stranger wore a threadbare black sports jacket that looked like it might have come from a second-hand shop and a dusty black kipah. He stroked his short beard as he walked up and down the rows of graves as the ox plows, stopping for a few beats at each to read the [...]

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It’s About Policy, Not Charity Gershom Gorenberg My latest at The Daily Beast, on why “getting government out of the way” defies Judaism’s insistence on social solidarity: Allow me to talk about Sodom again. A few weeks ago, I argued on this page that the Republican Party is committed to the “quality of Sodom” as [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new piece, just up at the Daily Beast: Eavesdropping from afar on the debate about how American Jews will vote this year is a slightly surrealistic business. Not just the claim that Jews will vote Republican because of Israel. Anyone who has passed Polling 101 knows that few Jews choose their presidential [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The Daily Beast: The great airlift is on. Around the time I tap out the last word of this post, a plane will take off from Israel carrying South Sudanese refugees—the people whom Benjamin Netanyahu calls “illegal infiltrators”—back to their home country. The “infiltrators” must go, the [...]

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The biblical figure Samson is often called Shimshon Hagibbor, “Samson the hero” in modern Hebrew. Writing in Hebrew for Netivot Shalom’s weekly publication on the Torah portion, my son examined what the biblical text actually thinks of Samson through a close comparison with the figure of Judah (Yehudah). Netivot Shalom has now posted  an English [...]

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Why simply cutting subsidies to haredim will cause suffering, not employment Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at The American Prospect: In our last episode, dear viewers, we watched as Israel’s main opposition party, Kadima, sold out its centrist voters and joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s government—thereby providing the prime minister a reprieve of over a year [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg My new column is up at the Daily Beast: Out for my morning bike ride Sunday, I looped up the ridge to Kibbutz Ramat Rachel on the south edge of Jerusalem. Two flocks of teenagers were coming down: the first dressed in white shirts, dark pants and crocheted skullcaps, the second in knee-length [...]

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