Gershom Gorenberg If Palestinians adopted a Gandhian nonviolent strategy, could they reshape the entire conflict with Israel and finally realize a two-state solution? If so, why haven’t they done so? Or perhaps they really have at certain times and places, and Israel has broken that form of resistance as well? Those questions have been asked [...]
The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Palestinian Gandhi
March 29th, 2009 · 24 Comments · Culture and Ideas, Judaism and Religion, Politics and Policy
Tags: "A Quiet Revolution"·"Armed Struggle and the Search for State"·"Men in the Sun"·"Path of Adam's Son"·Arafat·Bernard Rougier·Fanon·Fatah·Gene Sharp·George Antonius·Ghassan Kanafani·Gilles Kepel·Hamas·Hayim Nahman Bialik·Intifada·Islam·Jawdat Said·jihad·Karameh·Katy Antonius·Lucy Nusseibeh·Mahatma·Martin Luther King·martyrdom·Mary King·Montgomery bus strike·Motti Golani·Mubarak Awad·Mustafa Abu Sway·Nafez Assaily·Nakba·Nasser Juma'a·non-violence·PFLP·PLO·Qalandiya checkpoint·Quran·sadhu·Sami Awad·Sari Nusseibeh·satyagraha·shahid·Shariati·suicide bombing·terrorism·War for Muslim Minds·Wretched of the Earth·Yaron Ezrahi·Yazid Khader·Yezid Sayigh·Yitzhak Rabin
Reading Maimonides Through Islamic Glasses
December 4th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Judaism and Religion
Haim Watzman In his introduction to the Mishna, Maimonides (known as “the Rambam” in Jewish tradition) tells a story about the revelation and transmission of the Torah. Reading this story in light of Islamic doctrines about sacred revelation and transmission reveals that Maimonides, who lived in an Islamic society, sought to ground the written and [...]
Tags: hadith·Islam·Jewish philosophy·Judaism·Maimonides·Torah
The Progressive Imam
September 28th, 2008 · 11 Comments · Judaism and Religion
When I told my son that I was going to Cape Town, he told he had a friend there who belonged to a mosque committed to including women in worship, a community under the leadership of a progressive imam. It happened that my commitments to teach at Limmud, the South African version of the British [...]
Tags: Claremont Main Road Mosque·Islam·Limmud·Limmud South Africa·Rashied Omar·South African Islam
Revelation and Law: Elijah and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi
September 19th, 2008 · 5 Comments · Judaism and Religion
Haim Watzman When do religions based on text and revelation turn fundamentalist and extreme? When their adherents take their holy books and divine messages to be sources of infallible wisdom that needs no human mediation. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and other creeds can all inspire their adherents to take individual responsibility for weighing competing moral values, [...]
Tags: Christianity·Islam·Judaism·Justice·law·rabbinic
All The Conspiracy Theorists Are Out To Get Us–More On The Crusade Against Islam
September 12th, 2008 · 14 Comments · Politics and Policy
Haim Watzman Y. Ben-David, South Jerusalem’s most intrepid commenter, writes, in response to my previous post on anti-Semitism in Islam, that a significant part of the Muslim world today subscribes to theologies that demonize the Jews, as well as to outlandish conspiracy theories. I’d like to declare here, on the front page of this left-wing [...]
Tags: conspiracy theories·extremism·Islam·Israel·Judaism
Old-Time Religion, Newly Manufactured. Or: The Past Isn’t What It Used To Be.
September 11th, 2008 · 7 Comments · Judaism and Religion
An afterword to Haim’s post on screeds about anti-Jewish attitudes in Islam: A few months ago I wrote an article about anti-Muslim and anti-Christian prayers in Judaism. The anti-Christian prayers are medieval (I urged excising them.) The anti-Muslim prayer I cited is apparently a fake antique: It’s written in a medieval style, and it follows [...]
Tags: Amalek·Ishmael·Islam·Israel Yuval·Judaism·Occidentalism
Anti-Semitism in Islam–Not Decreed By Heaven
September 8th, 2008 · 19 Comments · Judaism and Religion
Haim Watzman There he goes again—Benny Morris is giving the battle against Islamic anti-Semitism a bad name. But then he’s not alone in fray. Nearly every passionate participant in the battle—Pipes, Horowitz, you name it—would make the angelically tolerant Roger Williams, the great American founder of religious toleration, go apoplectic. In one of the perverse [...]
Tags: anti-semitism·Benny Morris·Islam·Martha Nussbaum
More Anti-Semitism, or Just More Fear?
June 24th, 2008 · 10 Comments · Politics and Policy
Everyone knows that Europe has grown more anti-Semitic, as Avi Primor writes in the new issue of the Journal of Foreign Affairs. Like many things that everyone “knows,” the facts are different, writes Primor, who’s the former Israeli ambassador to the European Union and now head of the Center for European Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.
Tags: anti-semitism·Belgium·European anti-Semitism·France·Holocaust·Islam
Nonsense Detector: Obama and Islam; Orthodoxy of the Apostate; Hagee and Riskin
June 3rd, 2008 · 2 Comments · Judaism and Religion, Politics and Policy
Gershom Gorenberg Last month, military historian Edward Luttwack used the pulpit of the New York Times op-ed page to offer a solution to the American right’s burning problem: How can Barack Obama be attacked as both a dangerous Muslim and as the follower of a dangerous black pastor? (As I wrote , this is difficult [...]
Tags: Add new tag·atheism·fundamentalism·Hagee·Islam·Luttwack·Obama·Riskin
Update: Pipes harms cranks’ image
May 6th, 2008 · 4 Comments · Judaism and Religion, Politics and Policy
At the Wonk Room , Matt Duss discusses attempts by the National Review to prove that Barack Obama might actually be a closet Muslim who (gasp!) studied Quran as a child in Indonesia. And here I thought the unhinged right was busy sliming Obama for his connections to his pastor. What an interesting man that Obama [...]
Tags: Daniel Pipes. Obama·Islam
Swimsuit extras: Pipes Dreams
April 29th, 2008 · 14 Comments · Judaism and Religion, Politics and Policy
Reading your last post , Haim, I suspected that you’ve been hacking into my thoughts. Not about swimsuits per se , but about Daniel Pipes’s curious belief that swimming in mixed company is a democratic duty. Strangely, I spent a day once with Pipes. A dovish friend of mine with an interest in the Middle [...]
Tags: Daniel Pipes·fundamentalism·Islam·Islamicism·Judaism·separate swimming·swimsuits
Southern Exposure: Telling Jerusalem Differently
April 22nd, 2008 · 4 Comments · Judaism and Religion, Politics and Policy, Uncategorized
“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 [...]
Tags: Al-Aqsa·City of David·Elad·Ir David·Islam·Jerusalem·Judaism·Life in South Jerusalem·Muhammad·Old City·Temple Mount

