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Religious Zionism in CrisisWednesday, January 27, 2010 by Shlomo Brody | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza the movement appears to have lost its way, even as it retains its vital energy.
AliyahWednesday, January 27, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Israel has a general immigration problem; it also has an aliyah problem, to use the tradition-honored term for the specifically Jewish act of "going up" to the Land. The two problems are not the same, though in many ways, as a conference this week underlined, they're related. High-level economic opportunity of the kind that might attract large numbers of Western Jews doesn't exactly beckon. Meanwhile, the country's freedoms and porous borders make it an unregulated haven for hundreds of thousands of foreign non-Jewish laborers, legal and illegal, and declared asylum seekers from the world's trouble spots. For early Zionist thinkers like...
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 by Leon de Winter | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The popular Dutch politician Geert Wilders, on trial for alleged Islamophobia, proposes to call a string of academics and radical Islamists to back up his comparison of the Quran with Mein Kampf. What if he proves his case?Yesterday’s Man?
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 by Anne Appelbaum | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
Arthur Koestler in his time—and in ours.The Hardness of the Middle East
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 by Michael J. Totten | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
President Obama is not alone in discovering the region's intractability.Going Without a Kippah
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 by Yoav Sorek | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A well-known Israeli religious intellectual explains how removing his head covering symbolizes his idea of a Judaism infused with the vital spirit of secular Zionism. (Continue reading part 2 and part 3 of this three-part interview.)Secrets of the Scrolls
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 by Martha Wexler and Jeff Lunden | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
A Washington-area rabbi and Torah scribe rescues and restores scrolls that survived the Holocaust; or does he? There is room for doubt—but perhaps also for suspending judgment.
Mediterranean MaimonidesTuesday, January 26, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features
Civilizations come and go. Their greatest surviving creations remain. Such is the case with the work of Maimonides (1135–1204), a towering thinker, known to Jewish tradition as "the Great Eagle," who continues to defy easy characterization. Two new biographies depart from past treatments to situate the thought of this master philosopher within the Arabic civilization of his time, and more generally in the prism of the Mediterranean world. To the late scholar Shlomo Dov Goitein, the Mediterranean was a gracious, cross-cultural society that reached its apotheosis in the person of Maimonides' son Abraham, a Jewish devotee of Sufism. To Maimonides' more recent biographers, it...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 by Hatice Ahsen Utku | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
The Ladino tradition lives in the voice of Israeli vocalist Yasmin Levy, recently performing in Istanbul.This Land is Our Land
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 by Linoy Bar-Gefen and Meron Rapoport | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Picks
In new dialogues between young religious settlers and Palestinians, both sides rule out any intention of leaving.
