Article Archives

Sir Moses Montefiore

The name alone conjures up story-book images of a horse-drawn carriage from which a pious Victorian benefactor alights to bribe a local official, endow an orphanage, or dedicate a windmill.  Abigail Green's brilliant new biography—elegantly conceived, exhaustively researched, crisply written—presents a far more complicated and fascinating picture. Montefiore was born in 1784 to a family embedded in the cosmopolitan network of merchant Jews linking London, Livorno, Amsterdam, and the New World: a Sephardi diaspora well-placed for the opportunities presented by the liberalizations of 19th-century Europe. Montefiore made deft use of the new dispensation, at first to make his fortune through his...

The Religious Kibbutz

Alongside the centennial of the kibbutz movement, another, humbler jubilee is being marked: the 80th anniversary of Ha-kibbutz Ha-dati, the religious-kibbutz movement.  A unique blend of nationalism, socialism, and religion, it has generated a legacy whose significance reaches well beyond its sixteen member communes. The kibbutz movement as a whole was, from its inception, deeply committed to religion—that is, the Tolstoyan religion of labor. The religious kibbutzim strove to wed this new religion with the old one, and thus to remake both. The aim was a return to the land that would at once revitalize the ancient moral-religious energies of the Torah and issue a...

Civil Liberties

No democracy serves better than Israel as a laboratory testing the limits of civil liberties under traumatic conditions. The results are sometimes incoherent, but the common denominator is that, so long as lives are not endangered, freedoms are mostly safeguarded.    Some recent illustrations: a Jewish extremist was not prosecuted for holding up a sign calling the president a traitor, whereas another fell afoul of the law for advocating on the radio the expulsion of Israeli Arabs. A Galilee-based Islamist has not been charged for urging Arab students to sacrifice themselves as anti-Israel shahids [martyrs]. Left-wing organizations face no restrictions on...

Loose Nukes

Keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists is the announced goal of the Nuclear Security Summit meeting yesterday and today in Washington, attended by representatives of over 40 countries including Israel. It has its work cut out for it. Approximately 35 pounds of uranium-235 (about the size of a grapefruit) or nine pounds of plutonium-239 is enough to make a working nuclear bomb, according to the political scientist Graham Allison. Today, an estimated 4.6 million pounds of nuclear material is dispersed in 40 countries. Unfortunately, Egypt and Turkey are set to sideswipe the nuclear-terrorism meeting to criticize Israel's reputed...

Leo Baeck

"Jewish leadership" is a phrase whose meaningful content seems to grow paler with each new workshop aimed at cultivating it. ("Where are the Jewish followers?" quipped the late Arthur Hertzberg.) Since Moses, however, one true test of leadership has been the willingness to share the worst fate of one's followers. Such a leader was Leo Baeck. Born in 1873, the son of a traditional rabbi, Baeck studied at the Conservative seminary in Breslau before moving in 1894 to Berlin, where he studied with the philosopher and sociologist Wilhelm Dilthey and was ordained by the Reform-oriented Hochschule. His career reflected the mix...

Holocaust Remembrance Day

David Weiss Halivni sits in the National Library in Jerusalem working, as he has done for decades, on his multivolume commentary to the Talmud.  His lifelong immersion in the Talmud began in his hometown of Sighet, in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1944, at age seventeen, he was sent with his family to Auschwitz and a series of labor camps, and emerged a lone survivor. After the war he made his way to New York's Jewish Theological Seminary, quickly establishing himself as one of the premier Talmud scholars of the age.  Like most academic talmudists, Halivni approaches the text with a deep...

Kibbutz

Passover marks the anniversary of humanity's longest-running experiment in freedom. Another celebrated experiment—the kibbutz—kicked off its centennial on the first day of the holiday.  In the hundred years since ten men and two women obtained land from the Jewish National Fund for their commune, Degania, kibbutzim have been the scene of sacrifice, achievement, heartbreak, decline, and attempted renewal. All aspects are central to the story of Israel and Zionism. Kibbutzim never accounted for more than a fraction of Israel's population; their significance lay in the leaders they produced, their central role in the ruling Labor Zionist movement, and their sharp ideological...

Britain and Israel

Prime Minister Gordon Brown went to Buckingham Palace yesterday to ask Queen Elizabeth to dissolve parliament on April 12. New elections will take place on May 6. At the moment, the Conservative party under David Cameron is leading Brown's Labor party in the polls; the Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg, are in a strong third position. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the U.K. continues to exercise considerable influence in the international arena. Britain is a major force in the European Union and a permanent member of the UN Security Council; it plays a leading role...

Orthodoxies

"Is Modern Orthodoxy an Endangered Species?" This was the question posed at a conference yesterday in Jerusalem. Some speakers suggested that the very term "Modern Orthodoxy" doesn't fit the Israeli context or even accurately describe this slice of Jewish life. But what, indeed, is it? Like nearly all denominational labels, this one is a product of the ideological and political debates of the 19th century, as the radical options posed by modernity—including the possibilities of assimilation without conversion to Christianity and of political self-determination—scrambled traditional categories as never before. In this unprecedented situation, adherents of tradition in general and of traditional Jewish law...

Easter

Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17.     The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus:...