South Jerusalem is proud to announce that Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Watzman have been awarded this year’s Moskowitz Prize for Zionism . The award is given each year to people who act “for the benefit of the common good in order to ensure the strength and resilience of the national Jewish homeland.” It’s a distinct [...]

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Haim Watzman According to disturbing report in the latest issue of the British scientific journal Nature, a team of geneticists based at pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. has discovered that a strange set of markers shared by 90 percent of all Jews indicates widespread intermarriage with the Amalekite nation in the Middle Bronze Age. The [...]

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Purim is the Hebrew calendar’s brush with postmodernism. No other observance is so full of contradictions, alternative readings, ambiguities. Nahafokh hu, as the Book of Esther says—every character, event, and ritual comes along with its mirror image. We expunge the ultimate evil, Amalek, from our memories by remembering; we are commanded to recite a story [...]

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Recent news about the ex-governor of New York has revived debate among my progressive friends about the proper legal approach to prostitution. To this debate, I offer a memory of walking through Bangkok 20 years ago. My wife and I had been in the town a week, interviewing the city’s Jewish ruby dealers. One evening, [...]

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