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 [...]

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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) — [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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“Ancient Jerusalem Safari” said the sign on the side of the open-sided bus. It was parked this morning in the lot at the end of the promenade that stretches from UN Hill almost to Hebron Road. The promenade is an arc of stone walkways and stairs, of lawns and landscaping with a view northward of [...]

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Readers’ notes in the last few days include these tidbits: Moshe Feiglin, head of the Manhigut Yehudit (“Jewish Leadership”) faction in the Likud, has been touring the U.S., speaking at synagogues such as Congregation B’nai Yeshurun in Teaneck. Manhigut Yehudit’s website includes a draft constitution in Hebrew with such features as a rabbinical council that [...]

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Finance Minister Roni Bar-On is preparing a plan to rid Israel of all illegal immigrants within five years, Ha’aretz reports. The story did not state that Bar-On will then escape Israel in a flying saucer piloted by three-eyed green men, but it could have. Bar-On has about as much chance of ending illegal economic immigration [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg If you want to understand why Rev. Jeremiah Wright said the US government invented Aids, or what Barack Obama sought to accomplish in his Philadelphia speech on race, the best commentary is political scientist Marc Howard Ross’s book “Cultural Contestation in Ethnic Conflict” – even if it never mentions Obama or Wright. I [...]

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OK, I also had to click on a picture of a boxer with the word “Talmud” in the headline underneath. But when I read the NY Times story about Yuri Foreman, Orthodox rabbinic student and light middleweight pro boxer, what jumped out at me – for its fine surrealistic madness – was the explanation a [...]

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