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Festival of LightsMonday, December 7, 2009 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Hanukkah, the eight-day holiday whose Hebrew dates are 25 Kislev - 2 Tevet, begins this year on the evening of December 11. It commemorates an ancient victory at once military, political, social, and religious. Militarily, the victory, which took place in Judea in 165 B.C.E., saw the routing of the forces of the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes by a rebel Jewish army under the leadership of Judah Maccabee. Politically, it ushered in a prolonged period of independent Jewish rule under the Hasmonean dynasty. Socially, it betokened the triumph of traditionalist Jews over the assimilating Hellenizers in their midst. Religiously,...
Monday, December 7, 2009 by Ze'ev B. Begin | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
According to the Likud minister-without-portfolio, no final-status agreement can be reached until Fatah changes its program fundamentally.When Will Obama Learn?
Monday, December 7, 2009 by George S. Hishmeh | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Misled, perhaps, by his (Jewish) advisers, the President fails to see that no progress is possible until Israel is made to abandon its relentless program of colonization and ethnic cleansing.Four Seasons Lodge
Friday, December 4, 2009 by Andrew Jacobs, and director | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A recent movie (watch trailer) offers an extraordinary look at an American community of Holocaust survivors, gathering for the last time.What Illegal Settlements?
Friday, December 4, 2009 by David Phillips | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Jewish neighborhoods, towns, and cities in the West Bank may be controversial, but they do not transgress international law.Spinoza v. Maimonides
Friday, December 4, 2009 by Steven Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A new book by Rabbi Marc Angel attempts to resuscitate the idea of rational Judaism, and partly succeeds.Can We Blame Them?
Friday, December 4, 2009 by Tawfik Hamid | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Defending the Swiss ban on minarets, and answering the cries of outrage in the Muslim world.
Asymmetric LawfareFriday, December 4, 2009 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
The Goldstone Report on Israel’s conduct in the Gaza war, endorsed by the UN General Assembly on November 5, has taken on a life of its own in the court of world public opinion. Increasingly, both its enthusiasts and its detractors see it as a weapon, even more potent than the UN’s Zionism-Racism resolution of November 1975, in a campaign to render illegitimate the very existence of the state of Israel. So loud has the drumbeat over the Report become, and so widening its repercussions, that an entire website—cited in the first item below—is needed to collect the facts and to...
Friday, December 4, 2009 by Masha Gessen | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
On the 75th anniversary of its establishment by the Soviet regime, the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan is a barren monument to the conjunction of misplaced idealism with brute power politics.Four Seasons Lodge
Thursday, December 3, 2009 by Andrew Jacobs, and director | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A new movie (watch trailer) offers an extraordinary look at an American community of Holocaust survivors, gathering for the last time.