Gershom Gorenberg
My new column on the failure of the IDF rabbinate is up at Ha’aretz in Hebrew and in English translation:
The news in brief: A woman soldier asked to say kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, in an army synagogue. The rabbi of the base refused to let her. Again the army rabbinate showed narrow-mindedness that offended [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
More suggestions for Seder discussion:
We are, of course, the most free people in history. We can live where we want (even if the cars, streets, and shop signs make a thousand neighborhoods look the same); we can do what we want (though some days the choice seems to be between which brand of peanut [...]

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I’ll be speaking tomorrow, Monday March 16, at 8 pm. at Evan Fallenberg’s writers’ studio in Bitan Aharon, near Netanya. I’ll be discussing the dos and don’ts of memoir and travel writing. Tickets are NIS 60 at the door, NIS 50 a piece if you bring a spouse. Reserve seats by writing to evanfallenberg@gmail.com. Directions [...]

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Gershom is in the U.S., I’ve got the flu, and on top of that my hard disk died. On top of that, my parents are coming from the U.S. for a visit tomorrow. So my apologies, and my thanks to those of you who have kept the discussions going in the meantime. I hope to [...]

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We do our best to post high-quality material, and we’re grateful to our readers for the generally high level of discussion that takes place in the comments to our posts. If we don’t always respond ourselves, it’s because we’re busy working on the next post.
Recently, however, we’ve had several cases in which readers have inserted [...]

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My translation of David Grossman’s piece in The Washington Post-hw
by David Grossman
Like the pairs of foxes in the biblical story of Samson, tied together by the tail with a flaming torch between them, we and the Palestinians are dragging each other into disaster — despite our disparate strength, and even when we try very hard [...]

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We’re pleased that “Waltz With Bashir” has been named top film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics and would like to refer South Jerusalem’s readers to our posts on this important movie:

Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (1) – A National Nightmare on Film
Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2) — War Ethics [...]

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Our site was down on Friday due to a snafu in a server upgrade. We apologize to those who visited and got weird messages.

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Israeli journalists used to call August “cucumber season” because the only subject you could squeeze a news story out of during vacation time was the rise and fall in the price of cucumbers. This August is much more eventful, what with the Iranian atomic threat, war between Russia and Georgia, the Olympics, and the rise [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
The divide between the ultra-Orthodox and other Jews over who is Jewish continues to widen. In the latest developments, ultra-Orthodox rabbis in both Israel and the U.S. have asserted that conversion is reversible — that a convert can cease to be Jewish if she or he does not live according to halakhah, Jewish law, [...]

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Haim Watzman
Motti works out with me at the gym at the Jerusalem Pool. A cab driver by profession, he’s a bit younger than me and shares my exercise addiction; like me he has a teenage son who also works out at the gym. We work hard to stay healthy, and we both want our kids [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg
One of the bizarre ironies of Israeli politics is revealed once more in a response by NGO Monitor* to Nicholas Kristof’s recent column on Hebron and the price of occupation.
Kristof wrote of the particular burden imposed on Palestinians – and on Israel itself – by maintaining Jewish settlers inside Hebron:
The security system that Israel [...]

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