Shadow Strike
The U.S. and Israel, allies for more than 70 years, are sometimes at odds on specific policies and actions. Yaakov Katz’s new book Shadow Strike: Inside Israel's Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin’s Press) details one such disagreement involving a high-stakes threat to Israel in 2007.
Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions
This books tells the story of the Papal State’s 300-year effort to forcibly convert the Jews of Rome to Catholicism. The officially sanctioned campaign included kidnapping youngsters, harsh incarceration, and mind manipulation.
The Guest Book
Sarah Blake’s The Guest Book (Flatiron Books) spans three generations of an old-line Protestant family, the Miltons, whose manners and way of life represent what they believe to be the established and correct way of doing things.
A New Year, a New Opportunity for Jewish Learning
Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish new year, is a wonderful time to assess the past year and consider what we hope to achieve, spiritually speaking and otherwise, in the year to come.
The Rebranding of Judaism
Let’s talk about branding. There’s Apple, of course. Anything with an Apple logo on it is golden! You could take a regular computer, stick an Apple logo on it, and sell it for twice the price. How about Starbucks?
Galilee Diary: All Our Children
We returned from the inspiring tour of the Galilee Jewish-Arab youth circus in the US to lurid headlines about a “lynch” in central Jerusalem, when a group of Jewish teenagers went from trading insults with Arab teens who happened to pass by, to beating them up, so badly that one was hospitalized in critical condition (in a similar event about a year ago, the victim did not survive).
Galilee Diary: Uncertainty Principle
The details of the lunar cycle have been understood for thousands of years.
Galilee Diary: One People
[The Eternal] will bring you together again from all the peoples where the Eternal your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Eternal your God will gather you, from there [God] will fetch you.
-Deuteronomy 30:3-4