Magazine
To mark the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Menaḥem Froman, please enjoy an English translation of a piece he originally published in Haaretz on July 22, 2005 – less than one month before all Jews were forcibly expelled from the Gaza region.
Those attending the AIPAC Policy Conference in DC should ask some very important questions about Jewish liberation and the US-Israel relationship.
The objective shouldn’t have been greater proximity to power – to replace Haman with Mordekhai as prime minister – but rather the dismantling of an unjust system and a mass return to Jerusalem.
It’s difficult to believe that Israel once offered a political option for voters who would today feel torn between Ḥadash and the national religious parties.
The schism between the Western & Hebrew cultural gap is profound in Israeli society. It’s worth thinking hard about which side of the divide is truly free.
Stern was a revolutionary poet who inspired a liberation movement that restored Jewish independence to our land after nearly 2,000 years.
History is almost always advanced by the visionaries willing to dream & act while the herd merely sleeps.
The reconstruction of identities and meanings happens again and again in our people’s history.
It wasn’t until some years after I had left the Jewish education system that I realized I didn’t actually know the story behind Ḥanukah.
We refer to our enemies in this period as ‘Yevanim’ not for geopolitical reasons, but for the primordial cultural force that they represented and spread via their temporal power.
On a simple level there was happiness. The simple, apolitical happiness of Jews, happiness of ‘we will have a state of our own’ by those who only yesterday didn’t believe independence possible or necessary.
Just as Roman citizenship cost submission to Roman imperial culture, the cost of inclusion into liberal Western society always came with a subtle demand for cultural assimilation.