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Lies, Damn Lies, and Middle East Memoirs

Gary Sick's success is indicative of how lucrative stridently politicized pseudo-research on the Middle East can be.Darkness Visible

Himmler and Heydrich were careerists. This is not to say they were not anti-Semitic: They were, rabidly so. But fanatical anti-Semitism was also a good career move in Nazi Germany.Cyrus the Unappreciated Great

No Gentile is treated with such reverence in the Bible as Cyrus. But his example shows just how alien Iran's recent rulers are to the long history of Persia and its people.The Miracle

The state of Israel is the product of more than 4,000 years of Jewish history. "If you want to understand our country, read this!" said David Ben-Gurion on the first occasion I met him, in 1957. And he slapped the Bible. But the creation and survival of Israel are also very much a 20th-century phenomenon, one that could not have happened without the violence and cruelty, the agonies, confusions, and cross-currents of our tragic age. It could even be argued that Israel is the most characteristic single product, and its creation the quintessential event, of this century.1948: Palestine Betrayed

Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.  This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative" . . .  The Holocaust and Atrocity Prevention

Obama excoriated the Bush administration for failing to speak up about the Armenian genocide, yet he has also remained silent. But official recognition often comes at a high cost.Tazria-M’tzora: Gone to Seed

Torah Talk with Michael Carasik Our text begins by discussing a woman who does the verb tazria before giving birth—but does it mean that she conceives, delivers the baby, or . . . ? (Click here for source sheet.)  Download | Duration: 00:11:54Fixed Stars Govern a Jewish Life?

An alarming fundamentalist tendency has arisen in Orthodox thought—leading, for instance, to a book whose premise is that astrology is a true science having the full support of Jewish tradition.